Exciting Times: A drop of pitch is about to fall

I’ve written before about the pitch-drop experiment.

Eighty-six years ago, a professor started an experiment to show that pitch is an extremely viscous fluid, and that it actually does flow. So he melted some pitch into a funnel, let it cool (for three years), snipped the end of the funnel, put it in a sealed container, and waited for it to drip.

Eight years later, the first drop fell. And in the intervening 75 years, there have been seven more drips.

And the ninth one is now on it’s way!!!

There’s even a live cam. No one has actually seen one of the drops fall; so you could be the first!

Stay glued to your screen, it could drip any moment . . . or week . . . or month, now . .

Someday I still intend to have a pitch wine bottle (or perhaps a decanter) made for Peter van Inwangen (who has claimed that a liquid wine bottle is metaphysically impossible). Send me word if you know of someone who works with pitch, or some similarly viscous fluid.

By the way, I found this news by following a link to a really cool story about how cicada wings and lotus leaves are so water repellent that water condensing on them will literally leap off (using the energy of the water droplets balling together) carrying away any dirt or grime. Definitely worth a read. The world is amazing.

Now Jerry wants to understand compatibilism?

Even though Jerry Coyne banned be from his “Why Evolution is True” website, I still occasionally pop over there when I’ve run out of other blogs to procrastinate on. Today I find that he’s posed a few questions for compatibilists. Since I can’t answer them there (because banned, remember?), I thought I’d do so here.

Not that there’s much point to it. My answers are basically identical to those that most compatibilists would give, and I see that, e.g., Neil Rickert has already explained the basics to the crowd there.

But, for the record:

1. What is your definition of free will?

Acting without coercion from one’s sane desires and commitments.

2. What is “free” about it? Is someone who kills because of a brain tumor less free than someone who kills because, having been brought up in a terrible environment, he values drugs more than other people’s lives?

It is free because it is the action of a person’s character and abilities. The person was able to do many things, but chose from among those possibilities to perform a particular act.

We would need more details to decide how free each of these individuals was. If the brain tumor caused someone to act against her desires or commitments, then such an act was not free. A test that reveals some of the relevant features is the following: Give the person a button that will eliminate her or his desire to kill someone. Would the person push the button? If not, then this indicates that the person is indeed acting in accord with her or his character. If, on the other hand, the person would rid herself of the influence of her brain tumor, then she is not acting freely when it causes her to kill.

3. If humans have free will, do other species as well? What about computers?

Freedom is a matter of degree, not a simple yes/no. Some non-human animals (dogs, chimps) certainly have a degree of freedom. It seems plausible that humans are more free than other animals (having more developed ability to consider possibilities and weigh desires), but this would have to be decided empirically.

Current computers could be considered to have some rudiments of free choice/will, but they are very far from having the degree of freedom that (e.g.) most mammals do.

4. Why is it important that you have a definition of free will rather than discarding the concept completely in favor of something like “agency”? That is, what “new knowledge”, as Jeff noted, does your concept add beyond reassuring people that we have “free will” after all?

We’ve been through this many times before.

The reason is simply that when you tell the average person, “We have no free will,” they will ascribe more false beliefs to you than they will when you say, “We have free will.”

I draw my sample of “average persons” from well over a thousand undergraduates I have taught over the decades, and from internet discussants such as Dr. Coyne.

Now either way you’re going to get some false beliefs, because people are have a naive confused dualist notion about what we are and how we fit into the physical world. But the false beliefs that you get from affirming free will are easily dispelled: You just say, “We have free will, and we are also effectively determined.” This invites them to understand compatibilism, and the false notions of dualism can be safely flushed away.

A further important point has to do with the pragmatics of argumentation. Of course any vocabulary can be jettisoned in principle, but there are some strong reasons to try to keep old terms and concepts by modifying them as necessary but not rejecting them outright. (See my analogy to Christmas presents here.)

We’re going to need a term to distinguish between coerced actions (that one is not morally responsible for) and actions that follow from one’s character and desires (which actions one is responsible for). I take it even Dr. Coyne admits as much.

But why would we want to come up with some new term for this distinction? We already have the language for it. Actions I do because I wanted to are free. Coerced actions, on the other hand, are not free.

This is precisely the freedom that is under debate in discussions of “free will.” It would be a mistake to give up this language just because many of the common folk are dualists who think that “real freedom” is incompatible with physicalism.

Spacetime Singularities and the Origin of the Universe

There’s been some fun down in the comments section, so I thought I’d bring a bit of it above the fold to make it easier to find and read.

Someone going by the ‘nym OnceAnAtheist objects to my claim that the universe has always existed. Unfortunately, this objection is based on a misunderstanding of spacetime singularities in general relativity.

(Of course, we know that general relativity can’t be the final story, because it doesn’t account for quantum effects; but it’s still a story worth considering. And it’s still the best story we’ve got a the moment.)

To recap, my point is that a spacetime singularity is (by standard definition) an incompleteness in that spacetime, such that some path cannot be extended indefinitely, but instead has some finite length. This is often thought of as an “edge” or a “tear” in spacetime.

What we’re interested in here are singular spacetimes that have paths with finite length in a temporal direction. Black holes are examples of regions of spacetime that have a limited amount of future time; if you fall into a black hole, you reach the temporal end of the universe very quickly. It’s geometrically impossible for the path you’re following to be any longer, so it just runs out. (And you run out with it.)

It’s the end of the universe (try the beef, you’ll find it quite friendly).

The initial big bang singularity is basically the same, except time runs out as you’re heading backwards in time rather than forward in time. You can run a clock backwards in time to 13.8 billion years ago, but you can’t go any further – because time just runs out. It’s the beginning of the universe, there’s to more time to go back into.

The important point here is that there is never a time when the universe doesn’t exist. Time and the universe (that is, the spacetime manifold of general relativity) go together. When the universe has an “edge” (a singularity), time does as well. Time never goes beyond the universe. It’s like asking what the shape of the green region below the point labeled “singularity” in the above diagram: there is no such reason; all the green is above this point.

So this means that it makes no sense to speak of a “time before the big bang.” At absolutely every time, the universe exists. The universe is not infinitely old, but it also does not have a “beginning” in any ordinary sense. It never transitions from nonexistence to existence, because there was never a time that it didn’t exist.

So the universe has always existed.

Now, to answer OnceAnAtheist’s specific points:

Subway Pop Fiddles

First saw this (via the Mad Biologist) at the Boston Magazine.

Today I saw it on Huff Po. Rhett Price and Josh Knowles seem to be going places.

Hope to hear them in person one of these days at a T station.

Where does the Schrödinger Equation come from?

This looks like an interesting paper on the mathematical structure that makes the Schrödinger equation linear, and how it’s related to the classical (nonlinear) Hamilton-Jacobi equation.

I’d be interested to compare their approach to the the formulation of Bohm’s (hidden-variable quantum) theory that casts the equations of motion as a Hamilton-Jacobi equation with an extra (nonlocal) quantum potential. Food for thought.

Zombie Flow Chart

No time to write up an explanation of the argument, but I wanted to post this flow chart I threw together (below the fold). Fuller text version of the argument coming soon.

Of Philosophy and Science

There’s been a bit of a buzz in the blogosphere lately about the merits of philosophy, and whether it has anything to offer science or scientists. I’m guessing that some of it might be motivated by a resurfacing of the dust-up between Larry Krauss and David Albert prompted by Albert’s critical review in NYT.

Bee over at Backreaction complains about philosophers who don’t really understand the science they’re commenting on, and that as science continues to make progress in figuring out how the mind works, philosophers should just “get off the turf.”

PZ has a couple posts in which he bravely suggests that philosophical thought (such as displayed by Doolittle, a biologist and one-time colleague of mine) might help scientists avoid some common errors (and he interestingly distinguishes between technicians and scientists and argues that good scientific ability — by contrast to mere technical ability — is, in part at least, a form of natural philosophy).

Not surprisingly, however, several commentators appeal to Feynman (“Philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds”) and Dawkins, and to their general disdain for philosophy, to lament that PZ is giving in to mushy-headed woo, and that he’s dissing the bright steel blade of empiricism and data.

Anyhow, since I suppose I’ve got a dog in this fight, I thought I might as well throw out some thoughts:

1. The question is not whether we’re going to do philosophy; the question is whether we’re going to do good philosophy or bad philosophy.