Predictions for 2024

A few months ago, as a result of making disparaging comments about Isaac
Asimov's predictions in 1964 for 2014, someone asked me to make predictions for
2024. 

I think making predictions is extraordinarily difficult. And
I don't have the knowledge to attempt such a thing. However I decided not to be
boring and gave it a crack anyway. This is what I said: 

2024? Well I'll predict everything will be more or less the
same.

OK google glasses will have limited success when they are
first launched. But later models will become more and more popular as all the
issues are ironed out. It'll be like the history of mobile phones (cell
phones). At first very few people will have them, but eventually they became
all pervasive.

People will not make a one way trip to Mars in April 2023 to
live the rest of their lives there! I just can't see that happening, at least
not by that time.

Smart watches will find a market, but they will never become
that popular. They're too small and people will prefer their smartphones.

Much less stress will be placed on the notion that saturated
fats are a great evil. It will be increasingly recognised by 2024 that it is
sugar and refined carbs, rather than dietary fat and lack of exercise, which is
largely responsible for rising obesity rates and ill-health.

Yeah not very startling exciting predictions.  But I'm trying to be realistic.  I think I may have been proven to be correct with the Mars trip already since the last time I heard a year mentioned it was 2025!  But, regardless, I cannot imagine it happening before 2040, and I doubt that a one way trip will ever happen -- or at least not until Mars is terraformed!

A Purposeful Life?

We find ourselves in this world not knowing what we are, who we are, or
why we are here.  Are we  mere meat robots with no free will living out
our purposeless lives in a purposeless Universe?  Or are we souls with
an ultimate purpose to our existence -- a purpose which we cannot as of
yet know, or possibly even comprehend. Worst of all we don't know what
our ultimate destiny might be, whether it will be oblivion or whether it
will be to ascend into some mysterious new reality.



In our day to day lives let's just be happy for the day and have a few
pints of beer. Problem is I made a new years resolution not to drink from
the 1st January 2014 to the 31st March 2014.  I am mortified  🙁

The proposed changes to the UK National Lottery

Camelot, the operators of the UK National Lottery, have announced that the price of a national lottery ticket in the UK is set to double from £1 to £2 in the autumn (2013). The prizes are also changing. Currently the prizes for the Saturday draw are approximately as follows:

 

Match 3 balls = £10 (could be less but only under truly exceptional circumstances).
Match 4 balls = £60 (average)
Match 5 balls = £1,500 (average)
Match 5 balls + bonus = £100,000 (average)
Match all 6 balls = £4,100,000 (estimated)

Come the autumn these prizes will be:

Match 3 balls = £25 (could be less but only under truly exceptional circumstances).
Match 4 balls = £100 (average)
Match 5 balls = £1,000 (average)
Match 5 balls + bonus = £50,000 (average)
Match all 6 balls = £5,000,000 (estimated)

However a meaningful comparison of these figures has to take into account the fact that the stake has doubled. It is more useful therefore to compare the prizes as a ratio of the stake. So we have:

Match 3 balls current ratio = 10 new ratio = 12.5
Match 4 balls current ratio = 60 new ratio = 50
Match 5 balls current ratio = 1500 new ratio = 500
Match 5 balls + bonus current ratio = 100,000 new ratio = 25,000
Match all 6 balls current ratio = 4,100,000 new ratio = 2,500,000
 

Let's make it clear what this means by looking at matching 3 balls. Currently the stake is £1, the winnings are £10, hence the winnings are 10 * the stake, or a ratio of 10. In the autumn the stake will be £2, the winnings will be £25, hence the winnings are 12.5 * the stake, or a ratio of 12.5.

The important thing here which should concern people is how these ratios are going to change. We get the figures by dividing the new ratio by the old ratio. So we get the following figures:

Match 3 balls = 12.5/10 = 1.25
Match 4 balls = 50/60 = 0.83
Match 5 balls = 500/1500 = 0.33
Match 5 balls + bonus 25,000/1000,000 = 0.25
Match all 6 balls = 2,500,000/4,100,000 = 0.61

 
What this means is that for the number of balls matched other than 3, the prize money proportionate to the stake is going to go significantly down. Proportionate to the stake the jackpot prize will only be 61% of what it is now . The match 5 balls + bonus will only be a quarter (25%) proportionate to the stake of what it is now!

I assume that the 1.25 proportionate increase in the prize money for 3 balls will precisely offset the relative decrease in the prizes for 4 balls or more (since 3 ball prizes vastly exceed all other prizes combined). That is to say that I suspect that as a percentage the amount devoted to prizes will remain the same.


It seems to me that people predominantly play the lottery, not at the prospect of matching 3 balls and winning £10 (strictly £9 once the £1 stake is taking into account), but rather for that very small possibility of winning the jackpot, or at least matching 5 balls + bonus and winning a life changing ~£100,000. And given that lottery players tend to disproportionately come from those with lower incomes, one imagines that they want this small possibility for as small a stake as possible. If I am correct in this supposition then Camelot's proposals seem, if anything, largely diametrically opposed to these wishes.

I have therefore taken the liberty of emailing Camelot in order to express my dissatisfaction with their proposals. Within their response they state:

We know that players still love Lotto, but through extensive consumer research, they have told us that they want more ways to win more money. This is exactly what we will be introducing with the following changes to Lotto later in the year:

• More than doubling the bottom prize tier which is what players have said they want, from £10 to £25. This creates by far the most winners on Lotto on each draw.
• Increasing jackpots. £2.5 million on a Wednesday (£2.2m) and £5 million on Saturday (£4.1m).

I have no doubt that people have expressed the wish that the prize for 3 balls should be significantly increased. I also find it likely they expressed the wish to be able to win more money. Although peoples' motivation for playing is to win a life changing sum of money, in reality they realise that they most probably will only ever match 3 balls. So clearly they will express a desire for the £10 prize money to be increased. But I also strongly suspect that if it had been made clear by Camelot that such an increase in the smallest prize will be accompanied by a doubling of the price of a ticket, in addition to a relative decrease in the value of the Jackpot, and an absolute decrease in the value of the 5 balls + bonus and 5 balls prizes, then I'm sure peoples' reactions would have been somewhat less favourable.


But we shall see. Perhaps most people will welcome these changes with cries of delight. However I doubt it. Once it has sunk in that not only is the price of a ticket doubling, but that the relative amounts won relative to the stake for matching 4 or more balls is undergoing a substantial decrease, then I cannot imagine most people being happy.

Is a "life after death" possible if we are wholly physical creatures?

Keith Augustine has written extensively on the net regarding what he considers the unreasonably notion that we somehow survive the death of our bodies.  In a forthcoming volume edited by Keith entitled "The Myth of the Afterlife: Essays on the Case Against Life After Death" is a paper written by the philosopher Gualtiero Piccinini.  The abstract for this paper can be found here.  Unfortunately the actual paper itself is not available on the net.  However Gualtiero Piccinini was good enough to email me a copy.  Predominantly this paper focuses upon the contribution the neuroscientific data brings to the debate.  It argues that this data strongly suggests that brains produce consciousness, hence there can be no "life after death".

As an aside one can of course concede that the neuroscientific data does indeed constitute strong evidence that brains produce consciousness.  However this fact is blunted somewhat when we consider various alternative evidence. For example, near-death experiences and the closely related phenomenon deathbed visions, crisis apparitions, and so on.  Moreover it can be argued that ESP at least indirectly suggests that we survive the death of our bodies.  In contradistinction to the brain produces consciousness hypothesis, this alternative evidence with its implication of a "life after death" has the not inconsiderable bonus of being consistent with our intuitive conviction that we are persisting selves.  I have previously written about this here (in contrast naturalism/materialism is simply incompatible with the notion of a persisting self. This will be attempted to be made clear below in the context of the replication/teleportation thought experiment).  What for the sake of simplicity I didn't mention in my paper is that I also consider the notion that brains produce consciousness to be deeply philosophically problematic (each of the various positions eg reductive materialism, non-reductive materialism, strong emergence, seem to be untenable for differing reasons). However I don't want to address these deep philosophical problems here -- that can be deferred to when Keith's book is published and I write my review of it.



What I intend to do in this blog entry is to put aside my own beliefs and accept for the sake of argument that brains do indeed produce consciousness.  At first blush, even if this were a fact, it cannot rule out a "life after death".  I'm primarily thinking here of resurrection, or uploading our consciousness into a robot or some other artificial body.  Even the prospect of reincarnation does not seem to be ruled out so long as we understand it need not be a "soul" that survives in order to conclude that reincarnation might be meaningfully be said to have occurred.



However Gualtiero Piccinini disputes this, and he does so by a thought experiment involving the teleportation and replication of individuals.  In his paper he argues:

" imagine that teleportation is invented. A teleporter disintegrates your current body, extracts precise information about the location of each particle that constitutes you, and makes an exact particle-by-particle replica of you in another location. To go from New York to Paris, says the advertisement, you can take a plane, which takes seven hours and costs $1,000, or take the teleporter, which takes only a minute and costs $100. Which one would you take? If you are in doubt, consider a more advanced teleporter. It makes a copy of your body by scanning your present body without destroying it. Now it should be pretty clear that after you enter and exit the teleporter in New York, you are the person who is still in New York, while the new body in Paris is a mere replica distinct from you. Regardless of how many replicas are made and whether making replicas requires the destruction of your current body, your replica is not you. No one can make your replica numerically identical with you—not even god (contra Baker 2011)".

 

Unfortunately this is simply inconsistent with naturalism/physicalism/materialism, or indeed any position which holds that mental states are produced by brain states and are tightly correlated with them. Under naturalism there is no distinction between numerical and qualitative identity.  At that instant when the replica is created the replica necessarily must be you if it is physically identical. To deny this is to affirm that what "you" are is something over and above the totality of your physicality.



But let's press this further. The replica will look the same, share the exact same character traits and in general be absolutely psychologically indistinguishable from the original. Moreover this ostensibly teleported person will have memories of her life before being teleported -- she will remember standing in the teleportation booth, experiencing a sudden shift in perspective, and finding herself in the destination booth. In every way this newly created person will feel herself as being simply a continuation of the original and that she has merely instantaneously transported from one place to another. 



So to deny that the replica is the very same person is not only to deny that ones total physicality fixes identity, but also that the totality of ones psychological states, including memories, fails to fix identity too!   Of course under any materialist based metaphysic the former will entail the latter, but it is pertinent to stress this point.



So how does the materialist escape the seeming paradox the author alludes to? Imagine the following scenario. Imagine that every infinitesimal fraction of a second you are getting teleported from place to place. Obviously if you keep your eyes open you'll just see a confusing blur. But you could close your eyes, and everything would seem to be normal. You could be thinking of a problem, daydreaming, or whatever. Nothing would seem different as compared to when you have your eyes closed normally, except in the teleportation scenario you are continuously being killed and spontaneously coming into being every infinitesimal fraction of a second!



Now if we suppose that precisely this is happening in our second by second everyday existence then there is no paradox.



What this means then is that the materialist has to reject the notion of a persisting self. That's all an illusion. There is only the sense of a self, but that sense corresponds to no real self.

Let me try to be more clear about this.  If the original body is killed at the precise moment of replication then, from the perspective of the person being teleported, she will seem to “jump” to the remote destination.  But of course there’s no reason at all why the original should be killed at that particular instant.  Perhaps we might delay the termination of the original; by an hour say.  But then this creates the interesting scenario whereby it seems to the person that at the precise moment of replication she will have a 50/50 chance of either suddenly “jumping” to the remote location, or simply remaining where she is with the unpleasant prospect of being killed in an hour's time!

If you think this represents a paradox then you haven’t understood what I’m saying.  Should naturalism/materialism be true then, even in our apparent day to day existence, we do not even survive from one second to the next.  The overwhelming feeling we are persisting selves is all a horrible illusion.  The original person will die in an hour's time.  But intellectually, and as a good naturalist/materialist, this ought not to perturb her in the slightest since she is effectively “dying” every infinitesimal fraction of a second anyway.  Of course psychologically she is likely to be very frightened indeed!  This reflects the fact that we are all instinctively strong dualists, or at least that we are persisting selves i.e substantial selves.  It is overwhelmingly counter-intuitive to suppose otherwise.



Gualtiero Piccinini's thought experiment reveals that he too is instinctively a strong dualist.   In his paper he derides substance dualism, yet affirms that the self is substantial in his teleportation thought experiment.

Incidentally the philosopher Gualtiero Piccinini whose arguments I address here has actually seen this blog
entry and has commented in a blog entry here. Unfortunately he doesn't understand
my argument, although the people commentating underneath do appear to
understand it.  It will be interesting to see if he has modified his
contribution to the volume. 

UPDATE:  It's almost 3 years since I wrote the above. Myth of an Afterlife: The Case Against
Life After Death has now finally been published and I shall be
reviewing it in due course.

Further Update 8/5/22  Almost 10 years after my original post.  Here is my ~13,000 word review of this book. 

A Response to The Myth of an Afterlife

Changing the definitions of words does not prove anything

I read with interest this statement by Lawrence M. Krauss:

I spend a great deal of time in the book detailing precisely how physics has changed our notions of “nothing,” for example.  The old idea that nothing might involve empty space, devoid of mass or energy, or anything material, for example, has now been replaced by a boiling bubbling brew of virtual particles, popping in and out of existence in a time so short that we cannot detect them directly.  I then go on to explain how other versions of “nothing”—beyond merely empty space—including the absence of space itself, and even the absence of physical laws, can morph into “something.”

 Many modern physicists believe they have provided an answer to an age old philosophical question:



 “Why is there something rather than nothing?”



 But there's a big problem with their claim.  Physicists originally thought that a vacuum has no activity whatsoever, and hence is "nothing". Subsequently they discovered that a vacuum is a hive of activity with particles spontaneously popping in and out of existence.



Now what they should have done at this stage is acknowledge that what they thought of as nothing, was completely utterly incorrect.  That is to say that a vacuum is not nothing -- indeed far from it.



But they persisted in using the label nothing to describe a vacuum, which means that their definition of "nothing" is totally at odds with standard usage. Indeed their definition of nothing has nothing to do with the standard definition of nothing!



So they use an incorrect definition to then argue that physics has solved the age old philosophical problem of whether something can come from nothing. They even write books about it!



In short what they do is this:



They define nothingness as a vacuum.  However lots of activity is occurring in that vacuum with particles popping in and out of existence.  It is then presumably not too problematic to show that something can come from such nothingness. They then blur their definition of nothingness to imply that their demonstration equally applies to the standard definition of nothingness.  Hence they maintain they've provided an answer to the ancient question of whether something can come from nothing!



I have no idea whether:



a) They know what they're doing and are aware of the transparent dishonesty of their arguments.



b) They genuinely are unable to understand the error they are making.



Krauss does mention that in his book he shows that something can come from nothing even in the standard absolute sense  i.e. no space-time, no physical laws -- indeed absolutely nothing whatsoever.  Now Krauss is a professor of physics.  However he cannot use physics, or more generally science, to show that something can morph from absolute nothingness into something.  This is because physics can only be applied where there exist physical laws.  Hence a philosophical argument is required.  But in my experience physicists, even though they do not seem to realise this,  are in general notoriously very poor at philosophy.   Hence I am sceptical  of the notion that he has produced any worthwhile argument in this regard.  I do however have a certain curiosity as to what his argument might be.  If anyone knows what his argument is then I'd be much obliged if you could email me or add a comment outlining his argument.



What are my own opinion regarding the question of whether something can come from nothing?  Well first of all I do not find it incoherent to suppose an object can spontaneously acausally appear in front of me out of thin air. I don't mean through the equations of quantum mechanics, or by any other causal mechanism or scientific explanation, but truly acausally.



However something appearing out of absolute nothingness is quite a different kettle of fish.



The thing is nothingness is something we simply cannot grasp. If the Universe didn't exist there would be nothing at all. No space! No time! Just nothingness. And my mind simply can't quite grasp it. 



Can something come out of such absolute nothingness? I have no idea. Personally I suspect it's way beyond the intellectual capacity of human beings to answer such a question.

Is Reality real?

For the past couple of years I've increasingly been thinking how strange the world is.  For example, the fact we live on the surface of a huge ball floating in the midst of an infinite sea of nothingness.  It seems vastly more reasonable to me if we had, instead, found ourselves living on a plane; perhaps one infinite in extent in all directions.

Indeed I’ve even begun to wonder if we might not live in a virtual simulated world created by aliens living wholly "outside" our Universe.  This can be compared to the bots (computer controlled players) in a computer game at some point in the future becoming conscious and wondering if their world (game environment) has a creator.  We know that their creator – the computer programmer – is not some entity existing within their world; that is, unlike the bots themselves, the programmer does not equate to some pixels in their game environment. Rather the programmer exists “outside” of their reality altogether.

Similarly, might it not be the case that our world -- our Universe -- is likewise a creation of aliens living wholly “outside” of our reality?  Perhaps their Universe is utterly different; after all they live in the "real" world.  Perhaps the creation of our Universe is just a huge experiment on their part. Perhaps they monitor everything we do and say. Perhaps it might even be the case that they are conducting a kind of psychological experiment to see how long it will take before we twig on that our reality is artificial.

Or perhaps the creator is not some being or beings living in another Universe “outside” of reality, but rather what we traditional conceive of as “God”.   A Mind, perhaps infinite in scope, being responsible for the creation of our world, and even perhaps responsible for its second by second existence. 

I am not the only person who has had the notion that our entire reality might simply be a creation of conscious entities living wholly “outside” of our reality.  This is typically advanced in terms of the hypothesis that our entire reality is simply a computer simulation.

See this programme for example from about ~39 minutes onwards.

And this extract from a TV programme

Are Perceptual illusions always necessarily illusions?

I'm sure that all of us are astounded that the squares A and B are actually the same colour. It is the shadow cast over B by the cylinder which makes us think otherwise. What this suggests is a quite incredible illusion.



However I think there is a pervasive naivety about the nature of perception. Most of us doubtless feel that we see the external world directly. But we emphatically do not.



Consider a red rose. We think of a red rose as being the same colour throughout the day. However the light from the Sun reaching the Earth varies throughout the day. When the Sun is low in the sky, lots of blue light gets scattered away since the sunlight has to travel through a greater quantity of air. So if we were to passively see colours "as they really are", then the colour of our red rose would change throughout the day. Indeed the colour of all objects would change throughout the day. But in fact our rose seems to stay pretty much the same colour throughout the daylight hours. Why is this?



The answer lies in the fact that we do not in fact simply passively see what is out there. Rather the brain performs certain operations on the data coming through our senses and presents it to our consciousness in a form that we can make sense of. Everything we ever see is in fact a hypothesis about how the world is. Thus we have an implicit theory about the external world that it contains objects which have specific intrinsic colours. Hence the brain will perform those operations which ensure that objects do indeed appear to be the same colour throughout daylight hours.



This applies not just to colours, but everything we perceive through our 5 senses. In a way then everything we ever perceive is an illusion. But I think this is misleading.



Let's consider the "illusion" above again. If this were a real 3D object and we were to approach it and view it from various angles, then we would see that squares A and B are very different colours. Indeed their intrinsic colours would be precisely as we perceive them in the illusion above.



But in that case what justifies us in labelling it as an illusion? If this were a real object that we are seeing, then squares A and B are very different colours. Our senses are not deceiving us. Indeed if someone claimed to see the squares as being precisely the same colour, then it is doubtful that he could proficiently visually apprehend his environment.



This is not to say we never perceive illusions. Sometimes we seem to see something, but which on closer inspection turns out to be something else entirely. Or sometimes what we seem to visually see is not consistent with our other senses.

Edited to add:  I have a follow up to this post written many years later:  The Checker-Shadow "illusion" Part 2.