Joe

Writing a book arguing against the concept of mind; also looking at medicine and law around mental capacity. Researching at Oxford. he/him

[Joe @JosephFGough]

I started a substack, intending to use it to talk about my plan to train as a therapist. This week, however, I wrote about a close family friend's funeral, and last week I wrote about discovering that my Jewish ancestry has made me German... https://t.co/5NzdpiBwr3

[Joe @JosephFGough]

@analyticatheism put differently, he accepts that, eg, carbon is necessary for life, but attacks the inference to fine-tuning from this. I am attacking the assumption that carbon is necessary for life, because I don't think we need to worry about the technical machinery if such claims are false

[Joe @JosephFGough]

Arguments that the universe is fine tuned for life and cognition neglect contemporary theories of life and cognition - and so, they fail! My grumpy piece about why fine tuning arguments need to care about what 'life' is, now open access in Nous https://t.co/PSVOxPjVfJ

[Joe @JosephFGough]

@analyticatheism Insofar as he does not believe that the fine-tuning argument is sound, yes, but his criticism is I think quite firmly distinct from my own. Broadly speaking, I accepted for the sake of argument that the technical machinery for assigning probabilities works; he challenges that.

[Joe @JosephFGough]

@AStrasser116 of scale and possible forms of interference. But the core response is probably that using the models outside our own universe marks a big epistemic discontinuity and drastically reduces how sure we can be

[Joe @JosephFGough]

@AStrasser116 exactly how the argument got fleshed out. I don't find the 'speculative possibility' that prima facie unacceptable as a bullet to bite. I am not entirely convinced that the dynamics of, eg, neutron stars are a good analogy for the dynamics of a neutron-only universe as a matter

[Joe @JosephFGough]

@AStrasser116 (just for fun though, if we do want to try to extend our physics, we have some vague ideas from theoretical physics of how weird things might get dynamically - frictionless superfluids, interacting quantum vortices gravity waves.)

[Joe @JosephFGough]

@AStrasser116 I can't imagine life in a neutron universe, or what it might take for a neutron to be alive, and I'm not claiming I can. I'm claiming that we don't have a good estimate of how likely it is, and that fine tuning arguments need an at-least-passable estimate.

[Joe @JosephFGough]

@jeffkoperski @AStrasser116 I think this might be a new criticism! But every time I've ever seen someone say that about their own work before, they've been wrong...

[Joe @JosephFGough]

@AStrasser116 There's other bits to the argument, like a Cartwright-style view of modelling, but that's the core thrust

[Joe @JosephFGough]

@AStrasser116 They couldn't be on a similar temporal or spatial scale as life as we know it, but they don't need to be

[Joe @JosephFGough]

I wrote belatedly about the BAFTAs, Ye, and how 'santizing' psychiatric conditions in the name of destigmatization adds to stigma https://t.co/dhdYdL1Qbk

[Joe @JosephFGough]

I wrote belatedly about the BAFTAs, Ye, and how 'santizing' psychiatric conditions in the name of destigmatization adds to stigma https://t.co/dhdYdL1Qbk

[Joe @JosephFGough]

@awaisaftab I've got a book coming out with OUP soon-ish where I argue something similar. For a lot of clinicians who can't imagine funding increasing, it seems much emotionally easier for them to believe that people don't need help than that they can't provide it due to underresourcing

[Joe @JosephFGough]

@robsica Hehe, yep!