results of belief poll #1

I definitely enjoyed doing this poll, and look forward to doing it again soon with new questions.

While there will no doubt still be a few more people responding to the poll, I currently have 35 responses, including myself... which seems good enough to report the results.

Most of the questions came out about how I expected, based on opinions I've seen my friends express in the past. But there were definitely a few surprises, and a lot that I learned by looking at the results. Roughly speaking, it seems that my friends tend to agree with me on pretty much all the questions.

The only question where I was in the minority was on whether there have already been "negative consequences of global warming". I initially picked 3, which was the second lowest answer of anyone... and the only person picking lower, zarex, also picked 2 for whether it was manmade, which pretty much discredits any opinion he has on the rest of it... I don't think anyone could pick that for that question without being completely unaware/unfamiliar with the science. At any rate, after rethinking things I changed my answer to 5 instead of 3, because I really don't know whether there have been negative consequences. I see articles about supposedly negative consequences now and then, but they never seem all that rigorous to me, it all sounds like a bunch of speculation. Of course, many of the speculations could be true, but unlike the connection between CO₂ production and temperature increase, I don't think any causal relationship has been rigorously established. Then again, maybe I still should have answered higher because whether or not you can prove there have been any negative effects, it's entirely reasonable to think there may have been some minor ones (possibly, even some of the ones that get reported). I intend to keep more of an eye on this one, and see if it turns out I was just naive on this issue too. I've always had a strong intuition that global warming didn't make sense, but the further I've looked into it the more solid the science appears, so I've had to override my natural intuitions on a lot of it. Would not surprise me if I had to do the same thing for the remaining question. I guess part of the reason I'm more skeptical on that one is that I hear people so often saying ridiculous things like "oh it's really hot outside! must be global warming!" or "oh, we had a lot of storms this year, damn that global warming again!" The more realistic ones seem like changes to the ecosystem like increases in extinction rates... of course, then you have to debate whether something like that counts as "negative" before it actually affects human populations, which gets into a whole nother debate.

I guess the biggest surprise for me was seeing how many people buy into time travel and faster-than-light travel, at least enough not to mark them both a 1. Time travel has always seemed nutty to me, and filled with all kinds of paradoxes that make it untenable even if it weren't a blatent violation of the laws of physics. (Yeah, you can get rid of the paradoxes if you are able to paste together different branches of the quantum multiverse, but that also seems like it gets really sketchy really quickly, and would involve lots of infinite loops spawning infinitely more recursive branches every time... I don't think anyone has ever come close to actually coming up with a way in which that could make sense and be fully self-consistent) Same goes for faster-than-light travel. When I wrote it, putting in the word "local" was intended to make it clear that I was talking about comparing speeds locally, not jumping through a wormhole . But I guess judging by the responses, some people (notably geheimnisnacht) must have interpreted it differently. While I don't really think there is any possibility of a large massive object moving through the same space at a speed faster than a massless particle like a photon, I'll give it a 1 in 100,000, maybe even a 1 in 10,000 shot that maybe, somehow, there is a way to tear the fabric of space and reconnect it using a wormhole that joins two different regions of space and effectively gets you from point A to point B quicker than light would travelling the longer path (of course, you still wouldn't beat light that went through the wormhole too). But even with this interpretation, picking greater than 1 is unrealistic (unless you just picked something mild because you haven't investigated the subject or haven't thought about it). For those who picked 2 or higher (and have thought about it a lot), do you really think there is at least a 1 in 10 chance that something like that would work? If so, I blame Star Trek, and other bad sci-fi for this one =) Not that I don't enjoy watching it occasionally (and especially enjoyed the recent movie), I just wish people would view it more as fantasy than sci-fi. Also, for anyone who thought there was a decent chance of faster-than-light travel and a decent chance of intelligent life out there, I think you're being inconsistent... if it were possible to travel faster than light, then the Fermi paradox would be much worse; it would be essentially impossible to explain why we haven't detected extraterrestrial life yet... the only explanation would be that we are alone.

The most interesting result, however, was the one about whether there are properties of the world which are not determined by mathematical relationships. There were a lot of people who picked 1 or close to 1, and then another big cluster of people picking 10 or close to 10, and very few picking something in the 4-6 range. So it looks like I have two camps of friends, one camp which strongly believes one thing here, and another camp which strongly believes another thing. I myself picked 3, which wasn't nearly as popular as 2 or 1. If I'd answered it 2 years ago, I would have probably picked 1. So it's something I've been getting a lot more open-minded on, but I still believe roughly the same thing I have for my whole life regarding this. The wording of the question went through several phases. Initially, I phrased it in terms of materialism... "is materialism false"? I tried changing materialism to something that talked about mental properties reducing to physical properties, but I didn't like that wording either. There are just too many subtle ways in which the wording could be misinterpreted and I wanted something that got more to the heart of the issue that materialists and non-materialists debate. I think the thing that really distinguishes what people call the "physical world" from what some people call the "spiritual world" or the "mental world" or the "phenomenological world" is that physical properties are things that can be specified precisely by mathematical equations. You can measure a photon's wavelength, or an electron's charge, or the energy of something, etc. and reduce it to a variable that correlates with some other variable. But then there's the question of whether there is something more than just the equations going on, some substance perhaps... some metaphysics. It can also be interpreted as what Chalmers and others call "qualia", mental properties which do not supervene on physical properties... the things that philosophical zombies are supposed to lack. I'm still pretty confident that Chalmers is wrong, and that any of the other specific loopholes in materialism that people think they have found are wrong, but I've found over the past couple years that I'm more open in general to the possibility that there is some way my worldview there could fail... some way in which I haven't encountered yet or perhaps nobody has encountered yet. At any rate, it does seem like the kind of thing that Jaron Lanier warns against being too overconfident about... it certainly *appears* to me that everything in the world can be specified with numbers and equations, but sometimes appearances can be deceiving, even if they present a very compelling illusion... and I don't want to overstate my certainty just in case. Perhaps another way of explaining why I picked 3 rather than 1 or 2 is that it's easier for me to imagine that there is some way in which the entire framework for my worldview fails, rather than imagining that some specific detail is wrong... changing one detail messes up all of the other surrounding knowledge I have, that reinforces it. But tearing down the whole structure at once may actually be more likely if everything was an illusion from the start. Ok, now I'm kind of talking crazy talk so I'll shut up :)

Oh, and regarding the live forever question, I mentioned this in a thread but for those who didn't see it... my personal answer is that I'd really like to live at least 1000 years and I'd love to have the technology to do so (although I'm not as enthusiastic about seeing everyone have the same technology--could lead to societal problems). And I'd probably even want to live for 10,000 or 50,000 years. But once it gets into the millions of years, I'm pretty sure I would be bored to tears. And if I wasn't bored to tears, I'd have learned and grown and changed so much that there wouldn't be any meaningful sense in which the resulting entity was still "me"... so it's kind of moot. Also, I don't think it is even possible to live forever, given the heat death of the universe and all, so it's also moot from that point of view. Originally I had a 16th question asking whether you'd want to live 1000 years, but I had to cut it because lj wouldn't let me add any more.

P.S. Oh right, I guess I'm also in the minority on not wanting to live forever. So 2 questions out of 15.