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Decision Making

Who’s this ‘we’, Dr Soon? Unconscious Action and Moral Responsibility

A paper in Nature Neuroscience by Soon, Brass, Heinze and Haynes has demonstrated that it is possible (in
the case of a simple decision about pressing buttons) to predict what the
decision will be and when it will happen several seconds before the decision is consciously “made”. Does this demonstrate that our free will is an
illusion? That depends on what we mean by "we".

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These are not the probabilities you are looking for

There has been an increasing buzz in the papers regarding the impending launch of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Some of this concerns the possibility that it will lead to a disaster which destroys the world. This certainly sounds unlikely, and people who seriously suggest this are typically brushed aside with official calculations about the chance that the LHC will indeed destroy the world in any of the ways that have been suggested. For example, it is said that the chance of it destroying the earth though the creation of a particle called a strangelet is only about 1 in 50 million and the chance of it creating a black hole which does not evaporate is much less than this. However, these are not the probabilities we are looking for.

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Three arguments against turning the Large Hadron Collider on

In response to Anders Sandberg’s post on the Large Hadron Collider.

The physicists responses to worries about the risks posed by the LHC make it unclear whether they understand the moral issue. They may have the power, but they do not have the liberty to hazard the destruction of all present and future goodness. Nobody does.

Professor Frank Close of the University of Oxford has been quoted as saying that "The idea that it could cause the end of the world is ridiculous." (here). Is it ridiculous because it is impossible, or because it is very unlikely? I don’t think he knows it is impossible, and being very unlikely is not sufficient to dismiss the risk. Yes, it’s very unlikely, but being very unlikely is not remotely unlikely enough and may be beside the point, as, I think, these three arguments demonstrate.

Read More »Three arguments against turning the Large Hadron Collider on