The Ducks are no longer Afraid

Just been for a walk in running vest and shorts. A pleasant 14C (but probably much cooler than rest of UK).



Anyway, I was standing next to the stream in Hubbard Hills, near some ducks. One of them came waddling over to me and eventually started pecking at my shoes. And the rest didn't move away when I walked very close to them.



I thought this was kinda strange, the complete lack of fear. When I was walking away it was playing in the back of my mind that the ducks were slightly more afraid last year, they kept their distance. Why the difference this year?



Then I had an idea that might conceivably explain this. It revolves around the fact that, at the current time, we're in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak and the country is in lockdown.  So, perhaps readers can figure it out themselves? If not I'll explain in the next paragraph.

Normally Hubbard Hills is very crowded, but in the past 2 months or so, due to the lockdown, it will have been relatively quiet. More pertinently, there are normally lots of children running around. Many of them feed the ducks, but kids being kids, I suspect the ducks are sometimes chased! As a consequence, the ducks will become afraid of humans. But in recent weeks there are vastly fewer kids there, so the ducks are not getting chased. Hence they no longer are afraid.

10 Best Films

I've not seen anywhere near as many films as the average person. But here's my 10 favourite films in no particular order of preference:

1. The Matrix


2. Life of Brian


3. Groundhog Day


4. Koyaanisqatsi


5. Les Miserables (1978 version)


6. Joyeux Noel


7. All Quiet on the Western Front (1979 version)


8. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978 version)


9. They Live


10. The Truman Show

A squillion different Universes

Jus' think how incredibly unlikely it was that human beings evolved. I mean, that asteroid had to have hit the Earth 66 million years ago, and at that specific particular place to have the right sort of impact etc.



I have a solution! Suppose there are in fact a squillion different Universes, all with precisely the same laws. None of the others have humans in. The reason why we therefore find ourselves in this Universe with such an unlikely event, is that we couldn't be in any other Universe to have this thought in the first place. Voila! 😉

How much I like novels compared to other people.

Ever since the beginning of 2011 I've been giving a rating out of 100 for each novel I've read. I also thought it would be interesting to take the average Goodreads rating out of 5, convert it to a score out of 100 and compare this Goodreads rating to my own ratings. Here is the chart:

The blue dots represent each novel, a total of 323 novels. The x axis is my rating, the y axis is the average Goodreads rating. Hence, on the far left, my lowest rated novel I gave 6 out of 100, and if you read off the Goodreads value, it is 67 out of 100. Note also that the y axis starts at 50. That's because no Goodread average rating was less than 50.



The red dotted line is a trend line. It slightly slopes upward from left to right. This means that there is a positive correlation between how much I enjoy a novel on average, and how much the average person enjoys it. However, it appears to be a weak correlation. Indeed, the worst novel that I rated at 6, and my best novel rated at 89, have the very same Goodreads rating of 67! This suggests I really shouldn't take much notice of average customer readings at all.



My average rating is 57, but the average Goodreads rating is 80 (4 stars)! This means that Goodreads (and indeed Amazon) ratings are grossly inflated and therefore unreliable. I mean naively one might suppose that score of 80 or 4 stars means a novel is pretty good. But that is merely an average rating. To be in the top quarter of all novels a Goodreads rating needs to be 84/100 or 4.2 stars. So a big difference from 80 or 4 stars (better than half of all books), to 84 or 4.2 stars (better than three-quarters of all books).  This from the xkcd webcomic is appropriate.

As a matter of further interest, my average rating for male novelists is 58 and for females it is 55.  For the average Goodreads reader the figures are identical at 80.

Sabine Hossenfelder and Reductive Materialism

The physicist Sabine Hossenfelder said to me in the comments on a blog entry of hers:

What you say continues to be trivially wrong. You assume what you want to show. Please provide evidence that there is something about pain that is not a physical process.



Note, I have run out of patience with you. I will not approve yet another iteration of you stating your beliefs. Please provide evidence. Any peer reviewed and published paper that pain is not a physical process will do.

This is the universal pattern I see with materialists/physicalists. They simply ignore my arguments and say I'm "begging the question" or accuse me of employing some other informal logical fallacy. So far as I'm aware such accusations never have any merit, although they are very fond of employing such fallacies themselves.



This "begging the question" defence that materialists/physicalists utilize seems to act like a magic wand they wave in lieu of any actual arguments. I'm begging the question where exactly? That physics only deals with the quantifiable? That conscious experiences are in fact quantifiable -- perhaps because conscious experiences are the very same as the underlying neuronal activity (which obviously are quantifiable)? I have no idea, Sabine Hossenfelder never specified. And I have dealt with all these possibilities in my previous responses to her, and I get the same tired "begging the question" response and never anything substantive, time after time.



Materialists like Hossenfelder have an all-consuming obsession with evidence. Hence, she says I need evidence that reductive materialism is incorrect. I might as well equally retort where's the evidence that subjective idealism is incorrect? Or interactive dualism? Evidence is simply not relevant in determing the truth or otherwise of metaphysical hypotheses. If it is retorted that they are scientific, then how does science support materialism (and which version?) over idealism?  It doesn't (read the first two parts of this essay of mine).



I have shown that reductive materialism cannot possibly be correct here. In addition, in another essay, I have shown that reductive materialism is incompatible with a causally efficacious consciousness and that necessarily our consciousness must be causally efficacious, at least in the progression of our thoughts in reaching correct conclusions (see the first third of that essay up to "various objections").



Anyway, I have responded to her on her blog. This is my response below:



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Sabine, in common with most scientists and those besotted with science, you simply have zero understanding of these issues.



How many times must I tell you it's not a question of evidence, it's a question of being able to think. There's no evidence that could ever show that pain is material, at least not as the word is employed in reductive materialism. One could of course simply stipulate pain is material, but you would then need to expand the word "material" to include aspects of reality that don't fall under the ambit of physics. And BTW, this is why "materialism" can have a broader meaning than the word physicalism.



Peer reviewed papers? Peer reviewed by their fellow materialists no doubt. The academic world is infested with materialists who have been effectively brainwashed into an unthinking acceptance of the common western metaphysic.



Look, pain has no physical properties. It has no mass, no dimensions, no electric charge. It's not measured in any units. Oh yes, and it cannot be detected from a 3rd person perspective. So what is left by labelling it as "physical"? This is why materialists *identify* it with some physical process or the function carried out by such processes, or indeed say it's an illusion (materialists don't agree with each other, they all ardently defend their own variety of materialism). But it ain't identical. Redness is in every way wholly different from either the underlying neuronal activity and wholly different from the wavelength of light that physicists label "red".



The success of science -- and especially physics -- has its detractions. One major detraction is that people imagine that science is potentially able to describe reality in its entirety. So, although we do not have at present a full knowledge of all physical laws, we can nevertheless be confident that, once obtained, there is nothing that such physical laws could fail to explain.



This is kinda like a metal detector user concluding that since his detector only detects metal, that only metal exists, and anything else such as plastic, rubber, wood etc must either be metal in disguise or simply be illusory. It is seriously that stupid.

A walk during the Lockdown

Went for a walk. In my experience just as many people walking around as there's ever been. Presumably not in town centres though.



Thought I'd hold my breath in case I came near anyone. That didn't work, people say hello to me and I have to respond. Being topless didn't put them off greeting me, not even the women.