All's well that ends well?

If I were informed that last night I had suffered a horrible pain, all memory and other traces of it having been erased, I would be scared that this might happen again, but the unremembered pain would be almost as nothing to me. All's well that ends well. On the other hand, if I learned that one of my children had suffered a horrible pain last night, though all memory and other traces of it were erased, I would not only be scared that this might happen again, but I would feel very sorry for the child for having felt that pain. I would be glad it ended well, but the ending wouldn't be all.

It's as if I were a presentist about myself and an eternalist about others. This is some evidence for eternalism, I think. For it is likely that moral attitudes towards self are a special case, to be taken care of by indexical-type considerations, while it is moral attitudes towards others that are a better guide to the objective order of the world.

Doomsday, numbered cards and firing squads

The stuff in this post is surely in the literature, but it's more fun to think it through oneself than to dig in the literature.

The Doomsday Argument holds that our position in the birth-order of humanity supports hypotheses on which we are roughly in the middle of the birth-order over hypotheses on which we occupy a more extreme position in the birth-order. Here's a back of the envelope calculation. Let's say that about 100 billion people have ever lived. Then we should expect that only about 100 billion people will live. If population stabilizes at 10 billion, that means that the earth's population will probably turn over only about ten times, and hence the human race will die out within 1000 years (life expectancy might go up to 100 years).

As a proxy for the complications of the full Doomsday Argument, consider a simplified version. The Demiurge flips a fair coin. If it's heads, he creates a single person. If it's tails, he creates a sequence of 100 people, a new person every 20 years. You come into existence, learn these facts from the Demiurge, and also learn that you're number one in humanity's birth order. By the Doomsday Argument, this should give you reason to prefer the hypothesis that the Demiurge got heads on his flip. And indeed there is a very nice Bayesian rendering of this. The probability that you're first given heads is one. The probability that you're first given tails is 1/100, since you could equally well have been anywhere in the sequence. So your position in the sequence strong supports heads. Indeed, if the prior probability for heads is 1/2, Bayes' theorem says your final probability for heads is about 0.99.

Birth order complicates intuitions a little. There are worries of essentiality of origins: could you have been anywhere else in the birth order? There is some reason to think that such considerations are irrelevant as what matters is epistemic and not alethic modality, but to rule them out, let's vary the case a little. The Demiurge tosses the coin. On heads, he creates one person on one planet. On tails, he creates 100 people, each on a different planet. And then after creating each person he takes a deck of cards numbered from 1 to the number of people (i.e., a deck containing just a single card labeled 1, or a deck of cards from 1 to 100), and gives one card to each person. You are apprised of all these facts and you see that you have a card labeled 1. You think: getting card 1 is very unlikely on tails, but is certain on heads, so probably the Demiurge tossed heads. The cards obviously correspond to birth order. It is clear that if the Doomsday Argument is sound, this argument is inductively good. The reasoning is exactly parallel.

But now consider a firing squad variant. One hundred people, including you, are blindfolded, and a different crack shot in the squad is assigned to each. The dictator tosses a coin. If it's heads, one of the shooters loads his gun with a blank and the others load a bullet. If it's tails, they all load their guns with blanks. They fire. You notice you're still alive. Then the dictator takes a deck of cards, numbered from 1 to the number of survivors, and hands them out randomly to the survivors. You look at your card before you look around for other survivors--perhaps smoke swirls around you and you can't see further than your card--and it has the number one on it. The exact parallel to the Doomsday Argument then would say that you have very strong evidence that the dictator tossed heads, since it would be unlikely that you'd see the number one card if there were 100 survivors.

But notice that if that's how you're thinking, you're neglecting a crucial piece of evidence: your survival. Yes, the number one card favors the heads hypothesis. But the earlier observation that you survived favors the tails hypothesis. Your probability of survival on heads is 1/100, and on tails it is 1. In fact, the two pieces of evidence cancel out perfectly. For consider the combined piece of evidence: you survive and get the number one card. The probability of this on heads is: (1/100)(1) = 1/100. The probability of this on tails is: (1)(1/100) = 1/100. So the overall evidence is neutral between the two hypotheses. Your probability of heads remains 1/2 as before the experiment.

If the Demiurge case with the deck of cards is analogous to the firing squad case, then in the Demiurge case we should say that overall you have no evidence for heads or tails. The diagnosis of what went wrong in the reasoning about the Demiurge case then is that the evidence of your existence was neglected. If it were taken into account, it would have canceled out with the evidence of the card number. And by the same token, in the Demiurge and birth order case, the evidence of your existence and the position in the birth order cancel out. And hence by parallel the Doomsday Argument fails.

Is the firing squad case analogous to the Demiurge case? The one potentially relevant difference between the two cases is that the firing squad case is about survival while the Demiurge case is about coming into existence. Does that matter? I don't know. But whether it matters or not, I do actually have an intuition that in the Demiurge case we should take into account the evidence of your existence. On tails, intuitively, you have 100 times greater chance of coming into existence. That precisely cancels out with the fact that on tails any one of the persons who comes into existence has a 1/100 chance of getting the number one card. And hence on balance no evidence is provided.

I am weird

The Doomsday Argument says that we should expect to be typical people: this is the "self-sampling assumption". Hence, we should expect to be roughly in the middle of humanity's birth order. But since the population has grown exponentially, being in the middle of humanity's birth order implies being close to the end of the world. Hence, the end is nigh.

But I have evidence against the self-sampling assumption. The self-sampling assumption predicts that I am typical. But I am not: I am weird.

Reproductions and forgeries

You can appreciate Monet's Woman with a Parasol in person through your own unaided vision. But perhaps you need eyeglasses. If you use eyeglasses while looking at the painting in the National Gallery, you're still appreciating Monet's painting. The same would be true if there were a window opposite the painting, and you were sitting in a tree and observing the painting through binoculars. Further, surely it makes no difference how the binoculars work. Ordinary binoculars work by rearranging light through lenses as it streams from the object to the eye. Digital binoculars, on the other hand, work by having sensors transform the light from the object and then creating images on tiny screens inside. When you look at Woman with a Parasol through digital binoculars, what you're appreciating is the painting through the binoculars, not the two tiny images on screens inside the binoculars.

But notice that with digital binoculars, you can do two things. You can look at the little screens inside or you can, as it were, look through them. The intentional objects are different: if you look at the screens, you see the screens; if you look through the screens, you see the world (including Woman with a Parasol, if that's where you're pointing the binoculars). When you look at the screens, your attention is at least in part on the pixels, the quality of the color rendition, the glare, and so on. When you look through the screens, your attention is on something out there in the world. The two experiences have distinctly different phenomenal feels, and you can go back and forth between them as in the case of the two duck-rabbit.

One more step. In Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, instead of cameras they have iconographs, which is a box with an imp that paints quickly with a little paintbrush. We can imagine binoculars made on that principle. A pair of eagle-eyed imps very quickly paint two little pictures in the box, constantly updating them. You could look through imp-binoculars at Woman with a Parasol, but we could also look at the pictures in the box, admiring the imps' workmanship. You could switch back and forth just by redirecting your attention. Note, however, that both ways of using the imp-binoculars could involve skill and knowledge. It might be that when you first look into the imp-binoculars, it's obvious to you that there are paintings inside (maybe you can see the brush strokes and the texture of the canvas) and only with experience do you learn to correlate the images in the imp-binoculars with the external world. On the other hand, if your visual acuity is not as good or if the imps are really good, you might not realize that there are paintings inside--it might feel like just looking through a pair of holes in a wall, and only with experience do you learn to see the images as little paintings.

At this point, it should be clear that one can look at a painting through its reproduction. It's just a matter of directing your attention and intentionality appropriately. It does, however, take knowledge. You need to know that the painting is a reproduction, just as you need to know that the imp-binoculars track the world to see the world through them.

This gives us an account of the properly aesthetic harm done by the forger of a particular painting (the forger of a particular painter's style is a more complicated case, but perhaps can be handled similarly). By blocking the viewer from knowing that the reproduction is a reproduction, the forger prevents the viewer from seeing the original through the forgery. It is the forgery rather than the original that is seen, but it is misconstrued. On the other hand, if the forger honestly informed us that this was a reproduction, she would be doing us a service--she would be providing us with a telescope pointed at the original.

What is interesting about this account of the properly aesthetic harms done by a forger is that it does not require us to value the viewing of an original over the viewing of a perfect reproduction. In fact, this account of what is bad about forgery depends precisely on the value of reproductions. One could--though one need not--hold that viewing Woman With a Parasol naked-eye, through eyeglasses, through optical binoculars, through digital binoculars, through imp-binoculars and through a reproduction are all equally valuable when the image quality is equal. In fact, viewing through a reproduction could be even more valuable, for instance if one's eyesight is poor and the reproduction is larger in size than the original. But it is important that we see the original through the reproduction, that the reproduction be a window on the artist's production, and indirectly on the artist's soul.

Likewise, we should see God through the world and especially through our neighbor.

CFP: Second Annual Theistic Ethics Workshop

Second Annual Theistic Ethics Workshop
Georgetown University
October 6-8, 2016

Confirmed Speakers:
Marilyn McCord Adams (Rutgers University)
Robert M. Adams (Rutgers University)
Russ Shafer-Landau (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Chris Tucker (William and Mary)
Candace Vogler (University of Chicago)

Goal: Contemporary philosophy of religion has been richly informed by important work in metaphysics and epistemology. At the same time, there has not been nearly as much work done at the intersection of philosophy of religion and metaethics or normative theory. To help inspire more good work in this area, Christian Miller (Wake Forest), Mark Murphy (Georgetown), and Chris Tucker (William and Mary) are organizing a series of annual workshops on theistic ethics.

Logistics: The second workshop will be held on the campus of Georgetown University in Washington, DC. We will begin with the first talk and a reception in the evening on Thursday, October 6 and will conclude at the end of the day on Saturday, October 8, 2016. There will be five invited papers and four spots for submitted papers. All papers will have 40 minutes for presentation and at least 40 minutes for discussion.  

Themes: “Theistic ethics” is to be understood broadly to include such topics as divine command and divine will theories, God and natural law, ethics and the problem of evil, moral arguments for a theistic being, infused and acquired virtues, the harms and benefits of theistic religions, specific ethical issues in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, and many other topics as well.

Applying: Those interested in participating should submit an abstract of up to 750 words and a current C.V. to Mark Murphy at mark.murphy@georgetown.edu by May 1, 2016. Word or PDF file formats only. Please prepare abstracts for anonymous review.  For although the organizers seek to have a balanced program both in terms of topics and presenters, the initial stage of review will be done anonymously. 

Submitters to last year’s event, whether successful or unsuccessful, are welcome to apply to this year’s workshop.

Questions about the workshop should be sent to mark.murphy@georgetown.edu. Notification will be made by June 1, 2016. If your abstract is selected, we will cover all of your expenses for the workshop, including travel (this includes international travel). Co-authors are welcome, but only one author’s expenses can be covered. You do not have to send your paper in advance of the workshop, and it certainly can be a work in progress.

Supported by the Robert L. McDevitt, K.S.G., K.C.H.S. and Catherine H. McDevitt L.C.H.S. Chair in Religious Philosophy

The needs of the human community

Andrea Dworkin argued that sexual intercourse between a man and a woman is always wrong because it involves a violation of the woman's bodily integrity. She concluded that until recent advances in medical technology, it was impossible for humans to permissibly reproduce. The antinatalists, on the other hand, continue to hold that it is impossible for humans to permissible reproduce. Such views lead to an incredulous stare. It is very tempting to levy against them an argument like this:

1. Coital reproduction is necessary for the minimal flourishing of the human community under normal conditions.
2. Whatever is necessary for the minimal flourishing of the human community under normal conditions is sometimes permissible.
3. Coital reproduction is sometimes permissible.

The condition "under normal conditions" is needed for (2) to be plausible. We can, after all, easily imagine science-fictional scenarios where something immoral would need to be done to ensure the minimal flourishing of the human community.

Reproduction is not the only case where issues like this come up. For instance, the destruction of non-human organisms, say plants, seems necessary for our flourishing. And I suspect that under normal conditions the killing of non-human animals is necessary, too (if only as a side-effect of plowing fields, say). Taxation may be another interesting example.

I have heard it argued that (2) is in itself a basic moral principle, so that killing non-human animals as a side-effect of vegan farming is permissible because it is permissible to ensure minimal human flourishing. But that seems mistaken. Rather, while (2) is true, it is not a moral principle, but a consequence of a correlation between (a) fundamental facts about what moral duties there are actually are and (b) facts about what is actually needed for minimal human flourishing under normal conditions.

This leads to an interesting and I think somewhat underexplored question: Why are the moral facts and the facts about actual human needs so correlated as to make (2) true?

Theists have an elegant answer to this question: God had very strong moral reason to make humans in such a way that, at least normally, minimal flourishing of the community doesn't require wrong action. Non-theists have other stories to tell. These stories, however, are likely to be piecemeal. For instance, one will give one evolutionary story about why we and our ecosystem evolved in such a way that eating persons wasn't needed for our species' survival, and another about why we evolved in such a way that morally non-degrading sex sufficed for reproduction. But a unified answer is to be preferred over piecemeal answers, especially when the unified answer is compatible with the piecemeal ones and capable of integrating them into a single story. We do, thus, get some evidence for theism here.

Deontology and double effect

This post continues the line of investigation from an earlier post. There I supposed that you're a police officer and you saw that Glossop was very likely to be about to murder Fink-Nottle, and the only way to stop him was to shoot Glossop in the head. Glossop was pointing a shotgun at Fink-Nottle, and your credence that he was about to shoot was 0.9999. I took it for granted that under circumstances like that it was permissible to kill Glossop. But on deontological grounds, I also assumed it was wrong to kill one person to save 9999 innocents. This did not seem to fit with standard decision theory, but I managed to make it fit.

I now consider a variant. In Gotham there are right now 10000 setups like the Glossop and Fink-Nottle story, each observed by a different police officer. You are the police chief. You know that in 9999 of the cases, the person in the Glossop role is about the murder the person in the Fink-Nottle role. But in the remaining one case, they are just amateur actors rehearsing a scene.

Should you order by radio all of your officers to shoot the Glossops in the head? There are arguments on both sides.

Pro: Each of the 10000 cases is just like the original case. So if in the original case, the officer should shoot Glossop, each of your 10000 officers should shoot. But if that's what each should do, that's what you should tell each to do.

Con: You know that by ordering all 10000 Glossops to be shot, you will be killing one innocent man (and 9999 guilty ones, but surely that doesn't make it better) in order to save 9999 Fink-Nottles. By deontology, this is wrong.

I think the Con argument is flawed. The death of the innocent Glossop differs from the deaths of the guilty Glossops. The deaths of the guilty Glossops are a means to saving the Fink-Nottles. The death of the one innocent Glossop isn't a means to saving any of the Fink-Nottles. We should take your issuing of the order "Shoot" to be intended to kill the 9999 guilty Glossops, with the death of the innocent Glossop a side-effect. (Admittedly, this is a bit awkward because you are ordering the innocent Glossop to be shot.) The side-effect is not intended, proportionality is met if the ratio 9999:1 is high enough (if not, change the numbers), and it seems likely that the Principle of Double Effect will justify the action.

I think the Pro argument, perhaps with some refinement, is convincing. This means that deontologists must find a way to block the Con argument. But it seems that the only relevant difference between this case and cases where ordering shooting is wrong on deontological grounds is the structure of intentions. So the above case provides support for the kind of focus on intentions that is essential to the Principle of Double Effect.

Toby the Targ

Happy New Year, everyone! And a blessed Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God!

Last year, for Christmas I made a Klingon bat'leth for my older daughter. This year, she wanted a stuffed Toby the Targ, like the one Molly plays with in an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The stuffed targs on the market are ugly. The one on the show was made over from a stuffed warthog. I found a matching warthog on ebay, gave it to my daughter for Christmas, and then she and I turned it into a targ by adding spines. Instructions and spine patterns are here.

Very rough draft of Infinity, Causation and Paradox

A very rough draft of Infinity, Causation and Paradox is now on github. Chapter 7 is the weakest, I think. I welcome comments about everything, by email or, preferable, with the issue tracker on github.

Utilities and deontology

You are a police officer, and it is looking to you like Glossop is about to kill Fink-Nottle with a shotgun. You hear Glossop say to Fink-Nottle: "This will pay you back for stealing Madeline's affections." Your justified credence that Glossop is about to murder Fink-Nottle is, say, 0.9999. Though there is some small chance that, say, Glossop and Fink-Nottle are practicing a fight scene for an amateur theatrical. The only thing you can see that you can do to save Fink-Nottle is to shoot Glossop dead (you can't yell at them, as you're too far away for them to hear you--you only know what Glossop is saying because you can read his lips). This seems to be the right thing to do, even though you risk a probability of 0.0001 that you are killing an innocent man.

On the other hand, it is not permissible to kill someone you know for sure to be innocent in order to save 9999 others.

There is an apparent tension between these two judgments. Standard decision-theoretic considerations suggest that if it is worth taking a 0.0001 probability risk of an adverse outcome (the killing of an innocent person, in this case) in order to secure a 0.9999 chance of some benefit (saving an innocent's life) then the disvalue of the adverse outcome must be less than 9999 times greater than the value of the benefit. Thus, it would follow from the first judgment that the disvalue of killing an innocent person is less than 9999 times the value of saving the life of an innocent person. But if so, then it seems it would be worthwhile to kill one innocent to save 9999 others.

Risk aversion is relevant to such judgments. But risk aversion tends to reduce the choiceworthiness (or at least apparent choiceworthiness) of actions involving uncertainty, so it's going to make it harder to justify killing Glossop, and that only strengthens the argument that if it's permissible to kill Glossop, it's permissible to kill one innocent to save 9999.

The deontologist might use the above line of argument to challenge the applicability of standard decision-theoretic considerations to moral questions. The person committed to such a decision theory might, instead, use the line of argument to undermine deontology.

But the whole above line of thought is, however, fallacious. For in killing Glossop, you accept a risk of 0.0001 of

1. killing an innocent who looks guilty to you.

But in killing the person you know for sure to be innocent, you accept a certainty of

2. killing an innocent who is known by you to be for sure innocent.

These are different actions, and hence it is unsurprising that they have different disvalues. Indeed, suppose you have amnesia and you know that you did (1) or (2) yesterday. You then clearly have reason to hope that what you did was (1). So the above argument for a tension between decision-theory and deontology fails. I suspect others succeed, but that's for other occasions.

RaspberryJamMod for Forge/Minecraft 1.8.8

I just updated RaspberryJamMod, which allows one to run python code in Minecraft (using a variant of the Raspberry PI Minecraft API), to work with Minecraft 1.8.8 (with the latest beta of Forge). Merry Christmas!

Here's a rebel fighter from Space Janitors (using a mesh in their Janitor's Closet) generated with the render.py script.

Trusting leaders in contexts of war

Two nights ago I had a dream. I was in the military, and we were being deployed, and I suddenly got worried about something like this line of thought (I am filling in some details--it was more inchoate in the dream). I wasn't in a position to figure out on my own whether the particular actions I was going to be commanded to do are morally permissible. And these actions would include killing, and to kill permissibly one needs to be pretty confident that the killing is permissible. Moreover, only the leaders had in their possession sufficient information to make the judgment, so I would have to rely on their judgment. But I didn't actually trust the moral judgment of the leaders, particularly the president. My main reason in the dream for not trusting them was that the president is pro-choice, and someone whose moral judgment is so badly mistaken as to think that killing the unborn is permissible is not to be trusted in moral judgments relating to life and death. As a result, I refused to participate, accepting whatever penalties the military would impose. (I didn't get to find out what these were, as I woke up.)

Upon waking up and thinking this through, I wasn't so impressed by the particular reason for not trusting the leadership. A mistake about the morality of abortion may not be due to a mistake about the ethics of killing, but due to a mistake about the metaphysics of early human development, a mistake that shouldn't affect one's judgments about typical cases of wartime killing.

But the issue generalizes beyond abortion. In a pluralistic society, a random pair of people is likely to differ on many moral issues. The probability of disagreement will be lower when one of the persons is a member of a population that elected the other, but the probability of disagreement is still non-negligible. One worries that a significant percentage of soldiers have moral views that differ from those of the leadership to such a degree that if the soldiers had the same information as the leaders do, the soldiers would come to a different moral evaluation of whether the war and particular lethal acts in it are permissible. So any particular soldier who is legitimately confident of her moral views has reason to worry that she is being commanded things that are impermissible, unless she has good reason to think that her moral views align well with the leaders'. This seems to me to be a quite serious structural problem for military service in a pluralistic society, as well as a serious existential problem.

The particular problem here is not the more familiar one where the individual soldier actually evaluates the situation differently from her leaders. Rather, it arises from a particular way of solving the more familiar problem. Either the soldier has sufficient information by her lights to evaluate the situation or she does not. If she does, and she judges that the war or a lethal action is morally wrong, then of course conscience requires her to refuse, accepting any consequences for herself. Absent sufficient information, she needs to rely on her leaders. But here we have the problem above.

How to solve the problem? I don't know. One possibility is that even though there are wide disparities between moral systems, the particular judgments of these moral systems tend to agree on typical acts. Even though utilitarianism is wrong and Catholic ethics is right, the utilitarian and the Catholic moralist tend to agree about most particular cases that come up. Thus, for a typical action, a Catholic who hears the testimony of a well-informed utilitarian that an action is permissible can infer that the action is probably permissible. But war brings out differences between moral systems in a particularly vivid way. If bombing civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki is likely to get the emperor to surrender and save many lives, then the utilitarian is likely to say that the action is permissible while the Catholic will say it's mass murder.

It could, however, be that there are some heuristics that could be used by the soldier. If a war is against a clear aggressor, then perhaps the soldier should just trust the leadership to ensure that the other conditions (besides the justness of the cause) in the ius ad bellum conditions are met. If a lethal action does not result in disproportionate civilian deaths, then there is a good chance that the judgments of various moral systems will agree.

But what about cases where the heuristics don't apply? For instance, suppose that a Christian is ordered to drop a bomb on an area that appears to be primarily civilian, and no information is given. It could be that the leaders have discovered an important military installation in the area that needs to be destroyed, and that this is intelligence that cannot be disclosed to those who will carry out the bombing. But it could also be that the leaders want to terrorize the population into surrender or engage in retribution for enemy acts aimed at civilians. Given that there is a significant probability, even if it does not exceed 1/2, that the action is a case of mass murder rather than an act of just war, is it permissible to engage in the action? I don't know.

Perhaps knowledge of prevailing military ethical and legal doctrine can help in such cases. The Christian may know, for instance, that aiming at civilians is forbidden by that doctrine. In that case, as long as she has enough reason to think that the leadership actually obeys the doctrine, she might be justified in trusting in their judgment. This is, I suppose, an argument for militaries to make clear their ethical doctrines and the integrity of their officers. For if they don't, then there may be cases where too much disobedience of orders is called for.

I also don't know what probability of permissibility is needed for someone to permissibly engage in a killing.

I don't work in military ethics. So I really know very little about the above. It's just an ethical reflection occasioned by a dream...

Sharp OZ/ZQ 7xx organizer code

Back when I was a grad student, my dad gave me a Sharp OZ 730 organizer. It had a Z80 processor, and could (slowly) run BASIC programs. Some folks figured out how to run assembly code on it, and then I figured out how to target it with C code, and I wrote most of a library, designed a file system that hid in hidden recesses of the device, prepared an SDK and wrote or co-wrote a bunch of apps: games, a serial terminal emulator, a function grapher (it's really nice and polished, as I just discovered on trying it out after many years), an ebook reader, a Greek New Testament, some utilities. I got a couple more Sharp organizers, as a guy from Sharp UK liked what I was doing. (I think he liked that one could hook up the device to a modem and use the terminal emulator to check email.) Eventually, the unit got discontinued.

Recently, I've been digging out my code archives. They're mostly now on github, though perhaps not always the latest version. The code is a messy mix of Z80 assembly and C. The SDK worked by launching a CP/M emulator, running the Hi-Tech C compiler in the emulator, and then running a peephole optimizer. With limited memory and CPU power, one had to do a lot of optimization. I remember looking carefully at the code-cycle charts for the assembly, and then doing nasty little things like storing variables inside self-modifying code (instead of allocating two bytes for a global variable and then accessing it with, say, ld bc,(address), the first time the variable is accessed, I can do ld bc,value and store the variable right inside the immediate value), and implementing some of these in the peephole optimizer.

My big kids have one organizer unit each, so a couple of weeks I ordered a $2 USB-serial adapter from banggood. It came today and I can once again transfer the apps to the device (the hard drive on the computer I used to use for development of this stuff failed, and my laptops don't have a serial port). Sharp still has the downloader software here (I run it on Win 8 x64 in Win98+Admin compatibility mode). I even put a ZMachine emulator (not written by me) on my son's so he can play Zork (purchased from GOG).

Critical discussion of One Body

The latest issue of Annals of Philosophy has critiques by Murphy, Taliaferro and Perez, Trakakis, Hamilton, Archard, Griffiths, Wielenberg, Kąkol, Hershenov and Watt of my One Body book on sexual ethics. The critiques are powerful and interesting. There is also a retrospective account by me of what I am doing in One Body as well as a response to each critic (but not to each criticism--I typically picked one point per critic).

Causation and collapse

If determinism were true, then since each state could be project from the initial state, we could simply suppose that the whole four-dimensional shebang came into existence causally "all at once", so that there would be no causal relations within the four-dimensional universe. The only relevant causation could that of God's causing the universe as a whole--and an atheist might just think the four-dimensional universe to be uncaused.

I think that this acausal picture could be adapted to give an attractive picture of the role of causation in a collapse interpretation of quantum mechanics (whether the collapse is of the GRW-type or of the consciousness-caused type). On a collapse picture, we have an alternation between a deterministic evolution governed by the Schroedinger equation and an indeterministic collapse. Why not suppose, then, that there is no causation within the deterministic evolution? We could instead suppose that the state of the universe at collapse causes the whole of the four-dimensional block between that collapse and the next. As long as collapse isn't too frequent, this could allow occasions of causation to be discrete, with only a finite number of such occasions within any interval of time. And this would let us reconcile quantum physics with causal finitism even with a continuous time. (Relativity would require more work.)