Are philosophical zombies coherent?

One argument against thought experiments involving philosophical zombies is that philosophical zombies are incoherent, and I half way agree with that.

Consider two people, both named Bob. To distinguish them we'll call them Bob Normal (Bob_N) and Bob Zombie (Bob_Z). Physically, Bob_N and Bob_Z are identical. Atom per atom, they are exactly alike. They look the same, behave the same, say the same things, etc. To keep them from occupying the same space at the same time, let's put them in separate worlds that are also identical.

Identical, that is, with one exception. Bob_N is conscious and Bob_Z is not.

Some folks think this is an incoherent scenario, and I agree. It's incoherent whether you assume physicalism or dualism. Let me explain why each scenario is incoherent.

Let's assume physicalism

If physicalism is true, and Bob_N is conscious, that would mean the physical structure of Bob_N's brain is what's giving rise to his conscious experiences. If Bob_Z has the exact same physical structure as Bob_N, then it would be impossible for Bob_Z not to be conscious. That makes the scenario incoherent.

Let's assume dualism is true

If dualism is true, then the explanation for why Bob_N is conscious and Bob_Z isn't is because Bob_N has a soul and Bob_Z doesn't. Much of Bob_N's behavior is the result of causal interactions between his brain and his soul. Since Bob_Z doesn't have a soul, the same interactions are not going on in his head, and it is impossible that they behave the same way. That makes the scenario incoherent.

So either way you look at it, a scenario in which Bob_N and Bob_Z are physically identical and behave in exactly the same way is an incoherent scenario.

So how can the idea of a philosophical zombie contribute anything to the subject of dualism vs. physicalism? Some arguments rely on the possibility or conceivability of philosophical zombies to make their point, but I don't think that's necessary. A hypothetical scenario doesn't have to be possible to serve as an illustration. For example, Aristotle imagined what a world would be like without the law of non-contradiction. There would be no significant or meaningful speech or action in such a world. His point doesn't depend on such a world being possible.

In the same way, I think philosophical zombies can be invoked to illustrate how physicalism leads to epiphenominalism which, in turn, undermines physicalism, even if philosophical zombies are impossible. Here's a basic outline of the argument.

If physicalism is true, then all of our behavior (including our vocalizations) can be accounted for solely by reference to the third person properties of the brain and its parts, plus the laws of nature. You can explain exhaustively why somebody behaves in a particular way without ever referring to anything like a motive, belief, idea, desire, thought, plan, perception, etc. With that being the case, our behavior would be exactly the same even if these first person experiences didn't exist. Nevermind whether it's possible for them not to exist given our actual brain states. The point is that if our behavior would be the same in their absense, that means they don't contribute to our behavior. But that is absurd, so physicalism is false.

One objection somebody might raise to the above argument is that explaining behavior in terms of physics vs. psychology are just two ways of explaining the same thing. They are two layers of abstraction. It's similar to the difference between explaining the output of the computer in terms of functions like addition and subtractions as opposed to explaining it in terms of current, voltage, and the properties of electrons and various computer components.

But the same thing applies here. It is not because two and two actually make four that your calculator spits out that result. It would spit out that result even if the circuits didn't happen to represents the number two or the process of addition. You can program a computer to spit things out that are meaningful to us, but their meaning is irrelevant to the process by which the computer spits it out. It takes a conscious engineer and programmer to make a computer that spits out what, to us, is meaningful information.

In the same way, even if conscious experience is somehow the same thing as physical brain stuff obeying the laws of physics, it wouldn't matter one bit what those conscious expereiences are about. If some brain state associated with a sensation of burning resulted in jerking your hand away from a hot skillet, it would result in that same behavior even if it happened that the brain state was associated with a different conscious experience or no conscious experience at all. Under phyiscalism, it isn't by virtue of what our conscious experiences are about that results in our behavior. Rather, it's just the underlying physical substrate that produces our behavior whether the associated conscious experiences were about something different or absent altogether.

And that's just cray cray. I think the philosophical zombie thought experiment is useful to illustrate this even if they are not actually possible for the reasons I gave above.

Besides all that, it seems to me that artificial intelligence shows how something like a philosophical zombie could exist. Something resembling a human could exist that behaves just like a human, including having conversations and showing physiological behavior we usually associate with expressions of emotion without actually being conscious. If such a machine ever became conscious, we'd probably have no way to know it.

The a priori two step

There are a handful of things we know by intuition that are not necessary truths. Most other things we know depend on us knowing these handful of things. They include, but are not limited to, morality, the external world, the past, other minds, and the uniformity of nature. But within these intuitions, there are actually two things to know about each of them.

Morality

1. We know that there is a real objective difference between right and wrong.
2. We know some particular behaviors are right and others are wrong.

The external world

1. We know that there is an external world.
2. We know that particular things we perceive are part of the external world.

The past

1. We know the past actually happened.
2. We know some particular memories we have correspond to what happened in the past.

Other minds

1. We know there are other minds.
2. We know there's a mind behind the behavior of particular people and sometimes animals.

The uniformity of nature

1. We know the future will resemble the past.
2. We know that particular things will happen in the future because we've observed them repeatedly in the past.

In each of these categories, we are less sure about the particulars of the second items of knowledge than we are the first. In fact, we make mistakes when it comes to the second items of knowledge all the time. However, in each case, the fact that we can often be wrong with regard to the second is never a sufficient reason to doubt the first.

The fact that people disagree on morality, and the fact that we sometiems change our moral point of view shows that we often have incorrect beliefs about right and wrong, but that is no reason to doubt that there is such a thing as right and wrong.

Most of the time when we dream, we think everything we are perceiving is real, but none of it is. When we are awake, we see illusions and mirages. Some people experience hallucinations, phantom limb syndrom, or they hear things. Even in the case of people with psychosis who experience more than the usual amount of faulty perceptions, that is never a reason to doubt the existence of the external world entirely.

I've lost count of how many times I've heard people say, "Memory is notoriously unreliable." While I think that view is overblown, it is true that our memories often fail us. It's not just that we are forgetful. It's that we remember things differently than they actually happened. If you've ever been in a relationship for a significant period of time, you've probably had an argument over how something happened because you each remember it differently. I'm sometimes surprised when I read what I wrote in my journal years ago to discover things happened a little differently than I remember. Our memories are very fallible. However, that is no reason to embrace Last Thursdaism or doubt that there even was a past.

People are notorious for anthropomorphizing--attributing human traits (e.g thought and emotion) onto inanimate things. We also attribute the wrong mental states to things that have minds. We misread each other and misunderstand each other, but it's even worse when we project human traits onto other animals. Some people err in the opposite extreme and think animals have no thought or emotion. Some even go so far as to think animals are not conscious at all. With some bugs and worms, it's hard to even know if they have any conscious experience. However, the fact that we make all of these mistakes when trying to understand the minds (or lack of minds) of others is no reason in the world to doubt that there are other minds.

Hasty generalization is a fallacy we've all been guilty of at one time or another. It's probably the main reason superstition exists. We make generalizations by extrapolating from too few instances. We've all done it. Also, we often under-generalize. We refuse to learn from past experience. We can be stubborn and think next time will be different. However, the fact that we often make mistakes when reasoning inductively is no reason at all for us to doubt the validity of inductive reasoning.

Our confidence in the first item of knowledge under each category is why we exert so much effort toward being right about the second.

We debate moral issues and engage in moral reasoning because we think there are correct and incorrect answers to moral questions.

We rub our eyes when we suspect we're seeing things or ask others, "Did you hear that?" when we think we might've heard a suspicious noise. We do this to weed the bad perceptions from the good perceptions because we think there's a real world out there, and we want to make sure we're seeing it as it really is.

We write things down, look for corroberating testimony or evidence, strain our brains to remember how things really happened, and we retrace our steps in an effort to clarify our memories. We argue with people who remember things differently because we know that something happened. It's just a matter of finding out what.

When we initially notice patterns, we test them to see if they continue to repeat, and if so, under what circumstances. We formulate laws that describe in a mathematical way how we should expect the world to operate from here on out. We test these laws by making observations, and we extrapolate from the test to the rest of the world. If water boils at the same temperature under the same pressure every time we run the test, then we assume that's just the way water is, and it should apply just as well to samples of water we haven't tried to boil. We do these experiements because we know that experience can tell us what we should expect the world to be like going forward.

Most of the things you know, or think you know, can be traced back to these handful of a priori truths or truths like them. Others I didn't go into include causation, the law of parsimony, the notion that ought implies can, the reality of time, an enduring self, intentional action, object permanence, and the reliability of our cognitive faculties in general. For most people, the knowledge of these things is so automatic that they never even think about them. The knowledge runs in the background. But if you thoughfully ask, "Why do you think that?" for almost any random thing you know about the world, and you keep asking, you will eventually trace the belief back to one or more of these items of a priori knowledge.

Usually, that's where the line of inquiry stops. These items of knowledge are part of the foundation of all knowledge. They aren't inferred from something prior. The information is just built into us. We're hard wired to believe these things. Since these items of knowledge come pre-loaded into the brain of every reasonably developed human mind, and they are not inferred from evidence or argument, we know them by intuition. Intuition is immediate knowledge upon reflection. We don't turn our gaze outward to see if these things are true; rather, we turn our gaze inward and simply see what is written on the mind.

There are some people who attempt to find something even more foundational than these items of knowledge. They'll try to come up with reasons for why we should believe them other than intuition. However, the reasons always turn out to be less obvious than the truths themselves. That casts doubt on whether those reasons are what actually justify the beliefs or lead to the beliefs. Even if any of these attempts at arguing for one of these truths is a sound argument, the argument is probably not why we actually believe those truths.

It is possible for each of these things to be false. After all, none of them are necessary truths. But just because something is possible doesn't mean it's reasonable to believe. In the case of these a priori truths, it is unreasonable to doubt them, especially the first item of knowledge under each category. But that doesn't stop some people.

The normalizability objection to fine tuning, take one

Timothy and Lydia McGrew and Eric Vestrup published a paper called "Probabilities and the Fine-Tuning Argument." They came up with an objection to the argument from fine-tuning that's based on the fact that you can't specify the probability of a finite range of values over an infinte range of possibilities. The reason is because the probability wouldn't be normalizable.

According to the principle of indifference, if you don't know what the probability distribution is over some range of values, then you assume an equal probability distribution. That is, you assign an equal probability to each possibility. For example, if you had a six sided dice, and you didn't know if it had been ground in such a way as to make it more likely to land on 2 than on 3, then you assume it has an equal chance of landing on any side. Each side would have a 1 in 6 chance of landing face up. Since each side has a 1 in 6 chance of landing face up, and there are six sides in all, then if you add the probabilities for each possible outcome, the total is 1.

\[ \normalsize \frac{1}{6} \times 6 = 1 \]

If the probability distribution is not even, then whatever the probability of each side is, they should still add up to 1. The reason is because all the possibilities added together sum up to a guarantee. If you roll the dice, some side is guaranteed to face up. Otherwise, you haven't accounted for all the possibilities.

That's what it means for a probability distribution to be normalized. It means the individual probabilities of all the possibilities add up to 1 or 100%.

It is possible to normalize a probability distribution over an infinite range of possibilities, though. Consider a convergent series that sums to 1, such as this:

\[ \normalsize \frac{1}{2} + \frac{1}{4} + \frac{1}{8} + \frac{1}{16} + \text{. . .} + \frac{1}{\infty} = 1 \]

So if you had a probability distrubtion over an infinite range of possibilities in which the possibilities were put in one to one correspondence with that convergent series, you could normalize that probability distribution.

If you were using the principle of indifference, though, then you couldn't noramlize the probability distribution over an infinite range of possibilities. First of all, the probability of each member would be 1/infinity, which is zero. Second of all, even if it weren't zero, but was some small finite number, the probabilities of each possibility wouldn't sum to 1. It would sum to infinity.

Another related problem is that if the range of possible values is infinite, then the probability of any finite range within the total range would be infintesimal. That would render fine-tuning meaningless because no matter how big the life permitting range of some value is, as long as it's finite, the universe would still be fine-tuned. 1/n approaches zero as n approaches infinity, but the same thing is true of 10⁵⁰⁰/n. It doesn't matter how big the life permitting range is. If the range of possible value is zero to infinity, the probability of getting something in any finite-sized life permitting range is still infintesimal. To paraphrase Syndrome, "If everything is fine-tuned, then nothing is."

Luke Barnes, an astrophysicist from Australia, published a philosophical paper responding to the normalizability objection. The paper is called "Fine-Tuning in the Context of Bayesian Theory Testing." Most of this paper is over my head, but after furrowing my eyebrows and twisting my hair around my finger, I think I have gotten a handle on one particular paragraph on the bottom of page 7 of his paper that I want to talk about today.

I'm going to use the rest mass of an electron to explain, as best I can, how we can limit the possible range of values in order to normalize the probability distribution of those values. Basically, we can limit the range by what makes sense within the theories that describe the electron.

Bear with me. There's going to be a little math. Nothing too difficult. Also, just as a disclaimer, Luke doesn't go into all this math in that paragraph. Once I thought I understood what he was saying, I went and crunched the numbers to see for myself. Physics makes more sense to me if I can see the math. This is my attempt to break it down and explain it to you in a way that's more detailed and easier to understand (I think). If there are mistakes in these details, they are mine, not Luke's.

There are two theories that come into play in this explanation. There's quantum mechanics, and there's general relativity. According to general relativity, if you condense a given amount of mass to within a certain radius, it will become a black hole. The radius at which a given mass becomes a black hole is called the Schwarzschild radius. Here is the equation for the Schwarzschild radius:

\[ \normalsize R = \frac{2 m G}{c^2} \]

m = mass
G = the gravitational constant = 6.6743 x 10^-11 N*m²/kg²
c = the speed of light = 299,792,458 m/s

The rest mass of an electron is 9.109×10^-31 kg, which is 0.511 MeV. We can plug that into the equation to calculate the Schwartzschild radius for an electron.

\[ \normalsize R = \frac{2(9.109 \times 10^{-31} \, \text{kg})(6.6743 \times 10^{-11} \, \text{Nm}^2)}{(299792458 \, \text{m/s})^2} \]

\[ \normalsize R = 4.05 \times 10^{-49} \, \text{meters} \]

That's pretty small. Nobody really knows how small an electron actually is, though. There were some experiments where they bounced some electrons off of each other. They tried to figure out how big they were by looking at the scattering pattern, but it looked like they were point particles with no size at all. You'd think that if an electron were that small, it would be a black hole. If it has no size, but some finite mass, then it's density would be infinite. Zero radius is well within the Scharzschild radius. So what the what, you ask?

Well, that's where quantum theory comes into play. In quantum theory, the size of an electron is defined by it's Compton wavelength.

\[ \normalsize \lambda = \frac{h}{m c} \]

h = Planck's constant = 6.626x10^-34 joule-seconds
m = mass
c = the speed of light = 299,792,458 m/s

Instead of running the calculation this time, let's just get the Compton wavelength off the internet. For an electron that's 2.426×10⁻¹² m. Notice the Compton wavelength of an electron is many orders of magnitude bigger than its Schwartzschild radius. That's why the electron is not a black hole.

But suppose the electron was more massive. Well, there's a limit to how massive an electron could be before it becomes a black hole. To figure out what that limit is, let's set the Schwartzschild radius equal to 1/2 the Compton wavelength and solve for mass.

\[ \normalsize \frac{2 m G}{c^2} = \frac{h}{2 m c} \]

So,

\[ \normalsize m = \sqrt{\frac{h c}{4 G}} \]

Plugging in the numbers, we get,

\[ \normalsize m = \sqrt{\frac{(6.626 \times 10^{-34} \, \text{J} \cdot \text{s}) (299792458 \, \text{m/s})}{4 (6.6743 \times 10^{-11} \, \text{Nm}^2 \text{/kg}^2)}} = 2.73 \times 10^{-8} \, kg \]

In case you're worried about the units, 1 Joule is 1 kg*m²/s² and 1 Newton is 1 kg*m/s². The units works out. Don't worry. I did this on paper first. It's that total that might be wrong in case I made a typo in my calculator.

Notice that all of this just takes quantum theory and general relativity to their logical conclusions and predicts the highest mass an electron could have before becoming its own black hole. In reality, it's hard to say what would happen if an electron were that massive. Quantum mechanics and general relativity conflict on those kinds of scales, and we need a theory of quantum gravity to know what really happens.

But what this shows, according to Luke Barnes, is that there is a finite range of values an electron can take before our theories start to break down. Beyond that range, we can't trust quantum mechanics and general relativity. If we want our theories to make sense, then we have to place a limit on the range of possible values various constants can take. In the case of the electron, we can limit the possible range from zero to 2.73x10^-8 kg. Zero is a natural place to put the lower limit because negative mass doesn't make much sense. But if you don't like that, then you could put the lower limit at -2.73x10^-8 kg. Either way, we'd have a finite range of possible values, and that would allow us to normalize our probability distribution.

According to Luke Barnes, what I just showed with the electron can also be done with other constants. For constants that have units, like the mass of an electron, Luke says we can use the Planck scale to define a finite range of possible values to the constants. According to the internet, the Planck mass is 2.18 x 10^-8 kg, which is really close to what I calculated for the mass at which an electron becomes a black hole. For constants that don't have units, we can limit those ranges in other ways that I didn't go into in this blog post. He went into that in his paper, too.

There's a lot more to Luke's paper, and most of it I don't understand. What I just explained was my interpreation of the last paragraph on page 7 of his paper. If you read his paper, and you get to that paragraph, please leave a comment and tell me if you think I've misunderstood something or if I made some mistake.

Where I get my space and science news

Ordinary media (whether news papers, magazines, or news networks) are very unreliable when it comes to reporting new findings in science. They often distort the facts or give misleading information. A good example of that is the false or misleading information they put out about advances in fusion technology. Unfortunately, there are even some popular scientists who distort the facts when they're hungry for media attention. Sometimes I think the reason is just a desire to be sensational because sensationalism sells. Sometimes it's because the people reporting science news just don't understand the science.

Thankfully, we are not at the mercy of these sources anymore. There are actually competent people on YouTube who do a much better job of reporting space and science news than what you can get on TV, magazines, or news papers. I'm going to direct you to four of my favourites.

Fraser Cain (not to be confused with Frasier Crane)
This guy is not a scientist, but he is an unusually competent and knowledgable science journalist, so I recommend him.
https://www.youtube.com/@frasercain/videos

Anton Petrov
This guy is also not a scientist, but I think he used to be a science teacher.
https://www.youtube.com/@whatdamath/videos

Sabine Hossenfelder
Sabine is an actual physicist. She used to mostly talk about topics in physics, but lately she's become more of a science news channel. Besides being interesting and informative, she's also entertaining.
https://www.youtube.com/@SabineHossenfelder/videos

Dr. Becky
Becky is an astrophysicist. Most of her stuff is about stars, galaxies, and astronomy. Her specialty is black holes. Becky is fun to watch becasue of how enthusiastic she is about the topics she discusses.
https://www.youtube.com/@DrBecky/videos

If you're interested in physics, cosmology, astrophysics, or astronomy, you should subscribe to all four of these people. But they do sometimes talk about other things, like other fields of science as well as technology. I highly recommend all four of them.

Crazy times and reductio ad absurdum arguments

There are things people readily believe today there were thought of not merely as incorrect in the past, but as so utterly absurd that they were used in reductio ad absurdum arguments. If you held a point of view that, when taken to its logical conclusion, led in an absurdity, then that cast doubt on the truth of that point of view. That's how ad absurdum arguments used to work.

I can't remember the context, but I remember using an ad absurdum argument in which the absurity was that I claimed to be a black woman even though I'm obviously a white man. The argument probably had to do with whether claiming to be something meant that you were that thing, like claiming to be a Christian even though you denied the existence of God or the resurrection of Jesus. That reductio probably wouldn't work today because the absurdity is no longer considered absurd.

About 24 years ago or so when I first started reading pro-life literature, I came across a reductio ad absurdum argument meant to show that the fetus was a distinct organism rather than being a part of its mother. The argument was that if the fetus were a part of the mother (like an organ or an appendage), then you could have a woman with two heads, and in the case of a male fetus, a woman with a penis. If you tried to use that argument today, people would say, "But women can have penises."

We live in crazy times, and it's getting crazier. I wonder if some day reductio ad absurdum argument will no longer be considered a valid way of reasoning. Maybe they will be moved to the "logical fallacies" part of the logic text books since nothing is absurd.

Honest and productive debate and discussion

I become increasingly frustrated listening to panel discussions, interviews, cross examinations, debates, and even just regular conversation between average every day people. It seems like nobody is really interested in what anybody else has to say. Everybody wants to interrupt and talk over the other people. One person will ask a question of another person, but they won't let them answer. Often they will interrupt just to say, "You're not answering my question." Everybody wants to steer the conversation in a certain direction, but nobody else will let them, so nothing really ever gets fleshed out in a conversation. It's all surface level jumping from one topic to another in kind of a multi-directional tug-of-war.

I got into a rabbit hole of binge watching police interrogations on YouTube a few months ago. I noticed a huge difference between the way these interrogations take place and the way TV interviews, debate cross examination, and Congressional testimony goes down. The difference is that the police give the suspects as much room to talk as they can. They do everything they can to keep them talking, hoping all the while that they don't invoke their right to remain silent. The reason is because they know that the more the person talks, the more likely they are to give up a piece of information the police can use. So they don't interrupt the suspect even when they know the suspect is lying or being evasive. If the suspect has a story to tell, the cops will let them go on and on, and the cops listen to everything they say.

Why the difference? Well, I think it's because in most cases, we aren't actually interested in what other people have to say. We're just interested in what we have to say. We want to be heard, but we don't want others to be heard, especially when they disagree with us. We're not actually interested in learning anything from anybody. We just want others to learn from us. Often we don't think others have anything to teach us, but we think we have something to teach them. There is a general lack of respect we have toward people who see things differently than we do.

The police are trying to find out the truth. They know they're going to be lied to if the person is guilty, but even lies can be useful information. If somebody is in a debate, interview, or cross examination, the object isn't to find out the truth, but to win the conversation. In the case of Congressional testimony, it's often just posturing.

Of course the police can be very manipulative. I'm not claiming they're more honest than the rest of us. I'm just attributing their tactics to the difference in goals. I think that we should be more like the police in these interrogations, not in the sense of being manipulative, but in the sense of letting others speak and listening to them with the goal of eventually revealing the truth. The police, more than politicians, the media, apologists, or just your friends, family, and neighbors, are very interested in what the other person has to say. They make it their goal to draw them out as much as possible, to get them to say as much as possible, and to think carefully about what they are saying.

That is what we should do. Sometimes, we'll ask a question that's based on our assumptions or frame of reference, but if the other person doesn't share those assumptions or frame of references, and they try to respond, it's going to sound at first like they're not asnwering our question, and we're going to be tempted to interrupt them and say, "Just answer the question!" But we shouldn't do that. Instead, we should hear them out. Let them talk. Maybe it'll turn out that we had a misunderstanding. Maybe they'll make some necessary clarification we hadn't anticipated. Maybe they'll say something that doesn't directly answer the question we're asking but still contributes meaningfully to the conversation. Maybe it will reveal more clearly where the misunderstanding lies or why it seems like you're talking past each other. At the very least, it will give us more information about what's going on in the other person's head.

And besides that, it's the polite thing to do. As I said before, we all want to be heard. That's why we interrupt and talk over people. With that being the case, you should strive to be the one that's listening. It's an act of kindness and a show of respect to hear somebody out, show curiosity, listen to them, and think about what they are saying. One of the best compliments I've ever recieved was when somebody said, "I thought about what you said."

If you're an apologist (whether for theism, atheism, capitalism, socialism, or whatever), and you really want to advance your point of view, it still behooves you to hear the other person out and let them speak as much as possible. Just as in the case of the police, that will give you information to work with. You are in a better position to reason with somebody if you know how their mind works, what they already believe, and how they think. So you should make an effort to draw people out and not get flustered when they aren't directly answering your questions the way you'd like. You should still let them finish because they might say something else you didn't know but can use. Or it might be that they just have a round-about-way of communicating, in which case you just need to be patient.

In my own case, I can tell you that I often interrupt people because they are throwing too much information at me at once, and I can't process all of it. I need it in smaller doses so I can think about it and ask questions. If somebody monologues for ten minutes, and I have all kinds of things to say while they're talking, I'm not going to remember any of it when their ten minutes is up, and they want me to respond. Sometimes straining my brain to keep track of something somebody says so I can respond to it when they're done makes it difficult for me to pay attention to the rest of what they have to say. That's not as big of a problem in a classroom setting because I expect the lecturer to monologue, and I take notes so I can ask questions about something they may have said fifteen minutes earlier. Of course conventional wisdom is that you should listen to understand rather than listening to respond, but in reality, we do both. One does not simply give up the urge to respond, and one shouldn't give up the urge to ask follow-up questions.

I suspect I'm not alone and that some of you might interrupt people for a similar reason. While this post is mainly geared toward encouraging you to be a good listener, and not to be the obnoxious interrupter, I don't want to end this post without also saying that you should strive to be patient with those who interrupt you and who seem like they aren't listening to you. Maybe they aren't, but not all interrupting is a sign of disrespect or disinterest. The case of interrupting to keep your train of thought is just one example. Another is interrupting on accident because you thought the other person was done when they were just pausing for dramatic effect.

But even when people interrupt for bad reasons, we should be patient with those people, too. Dealing with people in general requires patience because none of us are perfect. We're all sinners, we can all be selfish, and we're all a little bit self-absorbed. If you can't be patient with people, you're going to grow to dislike people more and more as you get old, and then you're going to be all alone.

Here's a link to another post I made that's related to this subject: Just Answer: Yes or No?

David Grusch is probably lying, and other thoughts on aliens and UFO's

As much as I would like to find out there are aliens among us, I don't think there are. But I'm hopeful enough that I watched the interview with David Grusch. Before watching the interview, I was suspicious of the story because of my general skepticism toward alien visitation. I didn't know whether he was deceiving or was himself deceived, though. In clips I saw before the full interview, I got the impression that he hadn't seen any evidence of aliens himself. He was getting all his information from other people. But now, having seen the full interview, I think it's more likely that he's lying than that he believes what he's saying and is just duped.

First, there's just a vibe I get from his manerisms and the way he talks that gives me a subjective feeling that he's lying. I used to put no confidence in this sort of thing until experience taught me that when my gut tells me something about somebody, it's usually right. Of course it's a stronger impression with some people than with others, and in his case, my gut wasn't screaming that he's lying. It was just elbowing me that he's lying.

Second, he engaged in a little psuedoscientific non-sense during the interview. At the 7:50 mark, he appeals to his physics background to raise the possibility that they could be interdimensional beings. He says, "I couch it as somebody who studied physics where maybe they're coming from a different physical dimension as described in quantum mechanics. We know there's extra dimensions due to high energy particle collisions, etc., and there's a theoretical framework to explain that, yeah." The theoretical framework he's probably referring to is string theory (or M theory) because that's the only viable theory in physics that involves extra dimensions. In the most current version of string theory, there are ten spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension. We only see three spatial dimensions because the others are all compactified. Individual strings can vibrate within the extra dimensions, which is what gives particles their properties, but you couldn't have a whole civilizations living in them with living beings that could travel back and forth between those dimensions and ours. That makes no sense within string theory. It treats these extra dimensions as if they are different three dimensional realms like ours that a being could living in and be separate from our three dimensions. That is the stuff of science fiction, but it has no relationship to real physics, not even string theory. But worse than that, his claim that we know there's extra dimensions due to high energy particle collisions is flat out false. There's no evidence at all that string theory is true other than its internal consistency and its prediction of gravity, and there have been no studies at CERN or any other collider showing anything at all about extra dimensions. This is all psuedoscientific nonsense, and I think the fact that he appeals to his own study of physics to make these claims shows that he's lying.

Third, he used words (or tried to use words) that are obviously not part of his usual vocabulary. This shows that he's pretentious. He's trying to come across as more intelligent, professional, and authoritative than he really is. I'm always a little suspicious when people behave that way. For example, he said, ". . .true nonprosaic UAP situation could be constrived as, you know, a provocation. . ." (32:00) Constrived isn't a word. He probably meant to say "construed," but he got it mixed up with "contrived." He came across as pretentious in his word choices throughout the interview, and the whole thing just raised my suspicions about his honesty.

Pretentiousness is something I've noticed with some Christian apologists, too. I noticed it a lot with Ravi Zacharias. It isn't just speaking intelligently or with a good vocabulary. William Lane Craig speaks intelligently, but he rarely strikes me as pretentious. It's hard to put my finger on it, but I recognize it when I hear it. It comes in unnecessary word flourishes or obscure word choices when more common words work just as well or better. People sometimes say things like "constrived" when they're trying too hard.

Pretentiousness has its place, though. If you're writing poetry or some literary masterpiece or you're trying to get published or noticed, it makes sense to be a little pretentious. In those cases, you're trying to dazzle or impress. But if you're just trying to communicate information, the object should be clarity over other considerations, and too many times I've seen people sacrifice clarity in an effort to appear intelligent, sophisticated, or authoritative. It's especially noticeable when somebody tries too hard and doesn't fully understand the words they're using.

To be fair, though, there's at least one thing that counts in favour of Grusch's honesty. Allegedly, he testified under oath about these things. So, he put himself at risk of some kind of prosecution if he's caught lying. That does count in his favour. It's not enough to convince me, though, because I don't know what he actually said under oath. I just saw the interview. He wasn't under oath during the interview. For that matter, I'm not certain he testified under oath. I only heard that he did. I suspect he probably did because he does seem eager to have Congress or somebody look into these things. At the very least, you'd think he'd be willing to testify under oath.

I'm not saying that I know, am uttelry convinced, or that I'm absolutely sure that Grusch is lying. I think he's probably lying, but I could be wrong. That's all I'm saying.

Let me say something about my skepticism that aliens are visiting us. First, I don't claim that it's impossible. I just think it's highly unlikely for a few reasons.

I used to think it was nearly impossible that aliens have visited us becasue of an argument I used to have. The only reason a civilization would go to the enormous trouble of singling out another solar system among the billions that exist in our galaxy is if there were something that set it apart, and about the only thing that would set one apart is if it had life (especially intelligent or advanced life) on it. The only way aliens could know there was intelligent life on our planet was through our radio waves. The farthest our radio transmissions could possibly have traveled by now is 100 light years. The fastest anybody could possibly travel is near light speed. So the farthest any aliens who visit us could be is 50 light years away. That gives 50 years for our radio signals to alert them that we were here, and another 50 years to travel here. But realistically, our early radio waves are too weak to be detected 50 light years away, and realistically there's probably no aliens near us that could travel at nearly the speed of light. So realistically, any aliens visiting us are probably no more than 20 light years away, which is still generous. A civilization capable of traveling that distance would surely have more radio signals than we have, and since we've searched the skies for decades and haven't detected any alien radio signals, they're probably not within 20 light years of us.

This argument isn't nearly as strong as I originally thought because there are other ways for aliens to detect us than radio waves. They could detect life on our planet through spectroscopy. We are developing telescopes that can take the light that shines from a distance star, through the atmosphere of one of its planet, to a prism or something, breaking that light into its separate wavelengths. By looking at the spectrum, we can figure out what the atmosphere of that planet is made of since different chemicals absorb specific wavelengths of light. This could, potentially, allow us to detect life on other planets since organic life can release chemicals into the atmosphere that aren't produced any other way than by organic processes. With a more powerful telescope, we could do these observations for more and more distant stars. So it's possible life was discovered on our planet as much as a billion years ago by a civilization as much as a thousand light years away. Any aliens living closer than that might have time to reach us. It could be that aliens have been visiting our planet for millions of years.

But I'm still very skeptical. I think my argument was right that aliens wouldn't attempt to come here unless they had some really compelling reason to do so and that the knowledge of life here (or at least the high probability of life here) is about the only thing that could single us out. Well, there's that and proximity. If there were life in the Proxima Centauri system, they might send probes here just because we're nearby.

One reason I'm skeptical is because I think life is probably rare in the galaxy, and intelligent advanced life comparable to our own is vanishingly rare. The reason I suspect life in general is rare is because of the difficulty scientists have had in figuring out how we got from simple organic compounds, to self-replicating RNA, to fully formed cells. I suspect the difficulty is because it was a fluke, unlikely, extremely rare series of events. Besides that, it seems to have only happened once on our planet. Or if it did happen more than once, none of the other lines of transmission have survived.

Some people say the fact that it happened so early on our planet shows that it's not an unlikely event. I used to think that was a good argument, but I don't anymore. The fact that life started very early on our planet might be an observer selection effect. It took four billion years to go from single celled organisms to intelligent human beings. If it's normal for intelligent life to take that long to develop, then life would have to start early on any planet that has intelligent life. If life started too late, then there wouldn't be enough time for intelligent beings to evolve. At the very most, we've only got about a billion more years before all life ceases to exist on this planet because our sun is getting hotter and brighter all the time. So if life started three billion years ago instead of four billion years ago, intelligent life would never have evolved on our planet. So any planet with intelligent life comparable to our own might have to be a planet where life happened to start early. The fact that life started early on our planet, then, might be due to an observer selection effect rather than because it's easy or likely for life to arise from simple compounds.

So I suspect that life in general is rare in the galaxy. If there is life all over the galaxy, the vast majority of it is probably just single celled life. It took three billion years on our planet to go from single celled life to multicellular life. The jump to multicellular life must have been an extremely unlikely event. The unlikelihood of it is bolstered by an argument I've heard from Paul Scott Pruett and others about how rare functional sequences of amino acids are compared to non-functional sequences of a given length, like the average size of a protein molecule. So I suspect that the jump from single celled organisms to multicellular life is also rare on other planets.

There are a long series of unlikely events that happened on our planet that resulted in our being here. I don't want to go into those details because this post would be too long if I did. I just want to say that given hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, it might not be impossible that it's happened more than once. Even so, I still think exo-planets containing intelligent life would be few and far between. So it is highly unlikely that there's another advanced civilization near enough to make traveling here feasible.

But let's suppose there is or has been an intelligent species within 10 light years of us. There are still a lot of filters that might prevent them from ever coming here. One is the question of how long intelligent civilizations usually last. It seems like the longer ours lasts, the more likely it starts looking like we're going to destroy ourselves through nuclear war or destroying the planet through exploitation. There's also natural disasters that cause mass extinctions. We've had several mass extinctions on our planet. So it's hard to say how long intelligent species last on average and whether any would last long enough to develop the technology needed for interstellar travel. Even if a species isn't wiped out, they could be seriously set back. Our civilization becomes more and more fragile the more we rely on electricity and satelites. If we had a coronal mass ejection like the Carrington event today, it would cause far more damage to society than it caused in the 1850's, and it seems like it's just a matter of time before that happens.

Distance is a huge obstacle to any species wanting to travel to other solar systems. Unless they can travel near the speed of light, there's not much hope of getting anywhere within one lifetime. You can imagine intergenerational ships to overcome this problem, but that has problems of its own since energy, food, and resources have to come from somewhere. Plus, it has to be worth it to the passengers, and they better hope their ship doesn't break down on the way. The technology needed for something like that isn't just a few years away. It's probably thousands of years away. It's a major undertaking.

There are obstacles in space, too. Two of the biggest are radiation and rocks. The James Webb Space Telescope was hit by a grain of sand or something shortly after it deployed. Space debris is everywhere, and it's traveling super fast. You would have to travel super fast to get to another solar system in a reasonable amount of time. A small pebble could destroy your ship at that speed. Any ship that hopes to overcome the radiation and particulate matter on a long space voyage would have to have some massive and very powerful shielding.

It is theoretically possible to overcome all these obstacles, of course, but each obstacle makes it less and less likely that aliens have ever visited earth. I'm open to the possibility of aliens being here, and a part of me really hopes they are and that we'll find out for sure because that would be extremely cool. But I'm just very skeptical.

As far as the videos and things about aliens that have come out in the last few years, I've seen Mick West's attempts at explaining them, and I find all his explanations so convincing that it's safe to say in most case he proved that they are not aliens or highly advanced aerial spaceships of some kind. I'm not a UFO junky, so I haven't looked at everything that's out there, but I suspect what I haven't seen is probably just more of the same. Maybe some of it still defies explanation, but that doesn't mean it's aliens. It just means we don't know what it is.

I want to say one more thing just to be fair. There's this argument I've been hearing from other skeptics that goes something like this: It is unbelievable that an alien civilization so advanced that they could visit our planet would crash as much as David Grusch and others say they have. I think that's a poor argument for a couple of reasons.

First, the more difficult it is to complete a mission, then more failures we should expect there to be. When we advanced to the point of being able to drive cars instead of using horses and buggies, we starting having more accidents, not fewer. Traveling to Mars requires the most advanced technology we are capable of, yet half of all Mars missions end in failure. So the failure rate seems to go up as technology advances and as we attempt more and more difficult missions. A mission to another solar system is agreed by all to be extremely difficult, so why shouldn't we expect failures on the part of anybody who tries it? If we sent a thousand probes using solar sails to Proxima Centauri, should we expect that just because we were able to get there that we should also be able to land them all safely? Of course not. We shouldn't expect to land any of them at all. We should rather be lucky that a fraction make it there just to take some pictures before crashing or ending up in orbit somewhere.

A second reason I don't think the too-advanced-to-crash argument is a good argument is because without knowing how many aliens visitors we actually have, we have no idea what the crash rate is. 12 out of 50 is a much higher crash rate than 12 out of a million. If we grant that aliens are here, then we also have to grant that they have some kind of cloaking capabilities since they are so elusive. If they have some way of hiding, there could be millions for all we know, and 12 crashes is an extremely low crash rate. I see no reason to think any degree of technological advancement would give a species an infallible flying record.

Another bad argument I've heard from more than one skeptic is that a species advanced enough to travel here would be uninterested in visiting because we are so primitive that we are like ants to them. That's a terrible argument. We are planning to send probes to Europa and Enceledus in the desperate hope to find mere microbial life. Finding anything comparable to ant life would be wildly exciting. So even if we were like ants to another species, that doesn't mean we would be uninteresting to them. Also, the fact that they were more technologically advanced than us wouldn't mean they were any more intelligent than us. If we discovered something like cave men in the Proxima Centauri system, you can bet that we'd be pouring all our scientific and engineering efforts into sending a probe there to have a closer look.

I guess that's about all I have to say about alien stuff. I also think the incident in Las Vegas was a hoax that got out of hand.

Are there philosophical zombies among us?

I sometimes wonder, jokingly, whether there are really philosophical zombies among us. A philosophical zombie is a human being that behaves like any other human being except that it's all mechanical. There's no mind behind the behavior, no consciousness, etc. Philosophical zombies are just machines.

One reason I've wondered about this is because there are some serious philosophers who deny the existence of consciousness. I talked about that in this post. Or some people seemed to be confused about what consciousness even is. Anybody who is conscious knows they are conscious and what it means to be conscious, so anybody who denies these things or behaves as if they are confused about it might be a philosophical zombie.

There's another point of view out there--I think it's called analytical behaviorism--that tries to explain things like pain and desire purely in terms of behavior. For example, they might say that pain is just the tendency to say, "Ouch!" in certain situations. These people try to get away from using mental language at all. It's all just behavior. To me, that sounds exactly like what's going on with philosophical zombies. They just behave, but there's no felt experience of pain behind their expressions. There's no desire or motive behind anything they do; it's just mechanical action.

If there are really people who say that (I shy away from saying, "think that,"), then maybe it's because they really are philosophical zombies. Because otherwise, they'd know it wasn't true.

I suppose the one exception might be in the case of epiphenomenalists. These are people who believe in minds and consciousness, but they don't believe minds and consciousness have any influence over our behavior. Mental states are just the inert byproducts of processes in the brain. The brain gives rise to mental states, but the mental states don't give rise to behavior. The direction of causation (or entailment) only goes one way.

For all practical purposes, if epiphenomenalism were true (at least in the case of some people), then people are as good as philosophical zombies. We shouldn't expect that their behavior is indicative of anything that's going on in their minds. They could be saying and behaving one way while thinking and feelings something completely different. There's no reason in the world for evolution to have produced brains that generate minds and behaviors that correspond to each other since minds don't do anything. Smashing somebody's finger might actually feel good to them in spite of their crying out as if they were in pain. Their behavior is purely mechanical and can be accounted for purely in the language of physics and chemistry without reference to anything like desire, motive, belief, sensation, or feeling.

I don't actually believe there are philosophical zombies among us, but sometimes it seems like the only explanation for how people seem to seriously embrace these obviously false ideas. I say, "seem" because, of course, they don't really believe these things if they really are philosophical zombies. They're just behaving.