Online Philosophy

Scott Adams, author of the Dilbert comic strip and several books, including the interesting God’s Debris: A Thought Experiment (Amazon) and increasingly bitter Dilbert collections, like When Did Ignorance Become A Point Of View? (Amazon) has a blog as well and updates with ferocious regularity, almost always with a unique idea that usually freewheels into a thought experiment. Some work, some don’t.

A recent theme was free will.

The Little Robot That Could by Scott Adams

In this one he posits a robot, whose job it is to watch a baby, rocking it gently when it cries. This robot “gathers input from its environment and increments or decrements counters in its memory that are the equivalent of human urges.” The incrementing and decrementing are random enough to be unpredictable and, “just for fun, the robot’s voice will say out loud ‘I chose to do that’ after every action.” He describes the programming in a little more detail, but uses the example of a robot—which we know has no free will—to extrapolate that people also have no free will, as you can’t show how people differ from an arbitrarily sophisticated robot as, in the end, it’s all matter following the inexorable laws of physics.

The One Problem with the World by Scott Adams

This entry asks “[w]hat one simple problem could you eliminate … that would fix virtually every other problem in the world?” If you’ve read his blog more than once or twice, you’ve noticed that he doesn’t pull any punches, usually saying whatever the hell he pleases about his audience. This follow-up post to the “Little Robot” describes a lesson he learned from that article, namely, that the problem he would fix is this: “imbue us all with the knowledge of who is smarter than ourselves on any given topic”. That way, the confusion in the comments from his last post—in which posters assumed he was the moron, and he, likewise, assumed that they were, because he couldn’t see their point or they didn’t have one; he couldn’t tell in all cases. To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke: “any sufficiently advanced form of argument is indistinguishable from actual knowledge”. The point is that neither party can be absolutely sure that the other isn’t a super-genius making a killer argument that is just beyond them.

“My magical solution is to give humans the power to tell the difference between a super genius and a moron. I think this would solve every problem in the world because chances are that the smartest super genius in each field has a good idea how to fix that field. But the only solutions being considered are the ones coming from tall guys with good hair.”

What’s expected of us by Ted Chiang (Nature)

This is another short story/thought experiment about free well that posits a device called a Predictor: “…it’s a small device, like a remote for opening your car door. Its only features are a button and a big green LED. The light flashes if you press the button. Specifically, the light flashes one second before you press the button.” Therein lies the rub: even for those that thought they knew there was no free will, there’s nothing like proof positive. Some can handle it; other cannot. “Some people, realizing that their choices don’t matter, refuse to make any choices at all.” Interesting story; and short.