What is it like to be a bat?

You know what it is like to be a bat. To be a bat is to be a mammal like no other. You spend half the day dozing in caves, and then you all leave together. You flap about, in order to get anywhere. You find out where you are by seeing how the sounds you make come back to you. You are where all the others are. Each of you is there because everyone else is there. Everyone else is a bit batty. You know what it is like to be a bat.

In times of uncertainty...

Time spent in nature is linked to lower stress, restored attention, a balanced nervous system, increased levels of cancer-fighting “natural killer cells”, the activation of neural pathways associated with calm, and decreased levels of anxiety and depression. Phytoncides (compounds emitted from trees and plants), relaxation, stress reduction and awe are known to enhance immune function.

Lucy Jones, In times of uncertainty, let nature be your refuge (The Guardian, Friday 20 March 2020)
I took the photo below, of a collared dove in a cherry tree (on a road in my village), on 20 March 2015:

Red Dragon

This is a picture from Carl Jung's Red Book (which I just heard about via the blog that nobody reads); here is the picture in the book:

Failing the Turing Test

If a robot develops self-awareness, and has a lifelike shell, can it be distinguished from an actual human?

Yes, because no robot could be programmed to interact just like a human. Humans are almost completely lacking in self-awareness, and so they would be very bad at that sort of programming. They find it hard enough to program a robot to see an object, as an object.

Furthermore, humans have evolved to be able to assess each other for sincerity very accurately. So they would be extremely likely to pick up on such bad programming. So the question arises: how would a robot with self-awareness be distinguished from a human?

The clue is in the question: such a robot has self-awareness. And so if you ask it about itself, then it will know about itself. Whereas if you ask a human about him or herself, they will not really have a clue.

Definitive Selections?

Are definitive selections too odd?
      When we think of some things, and various combinations of them, it seems clear that all those combinatorial possibilities are there already, awaiting our consideration. And yet I am asking you to imagine that when a Creator, some such brilliant mind, considers some things, all those possibilities are blurred together (although none so blurry that it cannot be picked out); or am I?
      I am suggesting that for selections of selections of ... of selections, from some original collections, each possible selection from those will be a particular possibility only as it is actually selected by our Creator, independently of whom no collections of things would exist, were there such a Creator (as there provably is). The possible selections that make S(N) bigger than N (to use the terminology in my Cantorian diagonal argument) are those endless sequences of ‘I’s and ‘O’s that are pseudorandom; to make them, infinitely many selections have to be made, each one of which involves some arbitrarily large finite number of selections. They might be made instantaneously by our Creator, of course; and if so, then typical selections from S(N) could be made arbitrarily quickly.
      What about S(S(N)), which contains more things than infinite space contains points? Well, a Creator might be able to do all of that instantaneously. And similarly for selections from U, and UU, and maybe UUU; but still, you see how our Creator would have to do much more, and much, much more, and so on and so forth, without end. It is therefore quite plausible that for selection-collections that it would take me far more than mere trillions of pages to describe, our Creator would be unable or unwilling (and thence unable) to make all such selections instantaneously. After all, it is logically impossible for all possible selections to be made instantaneously. To will an incremental development of such abstract mathematics, as a necessary aspect of the creation of any things, might be regarded as a price worth paying for some such creations. And it is also quite plausible that were the Creator unable to do something (even as a consequence of such a choice) then that thing really would be impossible, given that the very possibility of it derives from that Creator.
      Solid things are solid; but mathematical properties related rather abstractly to their individuality can be works in progress; why not? Modern mathematics has a weirder story to tell of such matters! It is relatively straightforward to think of Creation as dependent upon a Creator who transcends even its mathematics. So, it may not be too odd to think of a Creator creating number by definitively adding units: 1, 2, 3 and so forth; is that any weirder than a Creator creating something ex nihilo? Number is paradoxical, so that the ultimate totalities of numbers are indefinitely extensible, and so numbers just do pop into existence, somehow; and what more reasonable way than by their being constructed by a Creator? What would be very weird indeed would be their popping into existence all by themselves, what with them being essentially structural possibilities rather than concrete things. It makes some sense to think of us creating them, as we think about the world around us, but there is something very objective about numbers of things. And again, if it makes sense for us to do it, then how can it be too odd to think of a Creator doing it, in a Platonistic way?
      There will be better ways to think of definitive selection, I am sure; but, it is the case that such weaselly words are the norm nowadays. For example, how can simple brute matter (just atoms, in molecules of atoms, each just some electrons around a nucleus) have feelings, such sensitive feelings as we have? How is that possible? Am I asking for a description of a possible mechanism? Perhaps; but a common enough answer is: Well, it must be possible, because we have such feelings, in this physical universe; although I don't know how sensitive we humans really are, looking at our world! Such answers are accepted by many scientific people, as they "work" on possible mechanisms!

Very High credence is Not belief

Imagine a spherical die with thousands of tiny faces. You can roll the die around in your hand, surveying all the faces and thinking, of each face, how unlikely it is to end up on top when you roll the die, but that it might. For each face, you have a very high credence in the proposition that it will not end up on top, but it seems that you do not believe that it will not end up on top; it seems so because for some such face you are not at all surprised when it does end up on top.

What would be surprising would be guessing which face it was before it ended up on top; and doing so repeatedly would be so surprising it would suggest some sort of trickery (or psychic power) was present. But that is, of course, quite different; and similarly, the fact that it is unsurprising that our beliefs should sometimes turn out to have been false is a different thing entirely.

The thing is, the Lockean assumption that belief is sufficiently high credence is similarly refuted by almost all of our quotidian beliefs. Consider an ordinary view from some window, for example:

The chance of any particular arrangement of cars, leaves et cetera is low, and so your expectation of having that view is low. Conversely, your expectation of not having that view, and your credence that you won't have that view, are high. But it is of course not the case that you tacitly believe that you won't have that view. On the contrary, you know that you will probably have some such unsurprising view.

Now, a high credence for each possible view not being the actual view is quite compatible with a high credence of one of them being it, of course; but not only is that compatibility paradoxical given the Lockean assumption (it is then the Preface paradox), I just do not believe that anyone really did tacitly believe, before they looked, that the particular possible view that would turn out to have been the actual one was not going to be the actual view. They just are not ever surprised by such an ordinary view.

Something like Fake Barns

What is adequate justification for holding a belief? It depends on one's context. A true belief that was well-justified when it was formed might cease to count as knowledge within a stricter setting, such as a court-room or a laboratory. And the famous Fake Barns involve unusual contexts. And of course, one needs to be sufficiently rational. Suppose that I see a red car, in a normal road (no fake cars), for example, and so form the belief that there is a red car. But, I also have a lot of irrational beliefs that there are various objects. When there is a red car, I believe that there is, and I am unlikely to have the belief that there is a red car if there is not a red car, although I am quite likely to have some belief that there is something when there is nothing. (It is easy to think of other examples of true beliefs that might seem at first glance to be justified but which do not count as knowledge because they are held by someone who is in some way unqualified.)

Putting the green back in the greenery

The external world of objective reality clearly contains objects of various kinds, shapes, colours and so forth. E.g. there are conifers (an evergreen). Many students of philosophy (following Locke) learn to distinguish between primary and secondary properties of ordinary objects. The former exist out there, in the objects themselves, e.g. their shapes (and natural kinds). The latter exist only as we perceive such objects, e.g. their colours; and so we soon reach the philosophical problem of perception: We see a tree as green, out there in the world, but the green exists only in our heads (so to speak). The modern scientific picture of the world has it that where we see the green tree are really just various biochemicals, reflecting certain electromagnetic waves toward our eyes. The green seems not really to be where we can clearly see that it is—out there, in the leaves of the tree—but to be only in the pictures of the world that our brains construct.
......Indeed, since such pictures are what we’ve been calling ‘the world’, some might think of the world as in their heads (which is one way to put the green back in the greenery). Many philosophers (following Kant) take the shapes of ordinary objects to be, not primary properties (as Locke thought), but also secondary. The world might really be composed of atoms composed of 10-dimensional strings, for example, with our brains imposing, upon the numerous sensations that come from our sensory organs, the usual 2 and 3-dimensional shapes that we see in the world around us. Indeed, since our brains may even be imposing the basic structure of a number of objects upon our sensory input, some philosophers conclude that ordinary objects just don’t exist in reality (e.g. see Jackie’s comments on my previous post, Chairs Exist). But what do we mean by ‘reality’? Surely we could only mean whatever space it is that includes the people whose language includes such expressions. So there are certainly some objects out there, i.e. other people.
......And similarly, I think, there is a sense in which the greenness that we see really is objectively out there, on the surface of such objects as leaves. That is because we learn the meaning of ‘green’ (as part of learning the concept of colour) by being shown various green objects or pictures (and red ones, etc.) and being told that they are all green (red etc.). Green is therefore something that ordinary objects can be. Basically, something is green if its surface is such that, under normal lighting conditions, it would give rise to the same sort of sensations in those looking at it as they had when they learnt the meaning of ‘green’. So when it comes to something being green—to it being true to say of it that it is green—it is irrelevant what those sensations are, whether they are the same for one person as for another (although they are probably very similar, in view of our similar physiologies); the objective greenness that we see via those subjective sensations is, by definition, less subjective than they are.
......Of course, you usually take the meaning of ‘green’ to be just such sensations as you would call ‘green’, because that is how you learnt to use that word. Indeed, we all do, and so that is also part of the meaning of ‘green’. That equivocation usually goes unnoticed—except in such philosophical contexts as the problem of perception—precisely because it is irrelevant what such sensations are (how they differ between people). And of course, the problem of perception is hardly a mistake of the order of a misperception. How else could we possibly refer to things in an external world, except via our side of our interactions with it? Perception is never a view from nowhere. Even scientific observations are careful perceptions of the external world. And when it comes to predicating existence of something, our most certain knowledge comes from some of us seeing that it is.
......Incidentally, a surprisingly good analogy for the problem of perception is a blind person, e.g. using a white stick to check her picture of where she is. Suppose her stick hits an unexpected obstacle in her path. Just from how her stick reacts to hitting it—how the other end of it feels in her hand—she can tell that it’s a bouncy, light, smoothly rolling object... presumably a child’s ball. She can knock it out of the way and carry on; but in the land of the blind, her word for such bounciness in an external object may well be the same as her word for the way her stick felt in her hand. Nevertheless, she would hardly be tempted to think of the world as full of feelings. It would be full of objects that feel one way with a stick and another to the touch, and in other ways via gloves (or other skin, hair, etc.).

A Linguistic Puzzle

Say you read something meaningful—e.g. ‘my tabletop is flat’—where’s the meaning? A fairly standard answer is that in that case, it’s a proposition whose constituents are the tabletop and something like the property of, or the extension of, being flat. That is, the meaning is in the flatness of the tabletop. A philosophical problem is to connect my tabletop and these words, these patterns of light and dark. All you get from me is patterns of light and dark. Never mind how I came to produce them. Unless they’re like words in a book of magic spells, all they are is stuff in the world exhibiting such patterns. Any meaning they have for you must be put into them by you. The paradox is that you read words to get from them someone else’s meanings. You often know, on reading something really meaningful—e.g. a great novel—that you’re not just getting back what you put into reading the words, not just a rearrangement of what (since you can read the words) you already knew. That’s the paradox; the puzzle is how analytic philosophy hopes to resolve such matters.

Cartesian dualism, ii

I’ve yet to find a good philosophical argument against such substantial dualisms as (for the commonest) that our psychology results from the interaction of spiritual souls with the physical brains in which (so to speak) they’re incarnated. The two commonest arguments are (i) asserting the closure of the physical and (ii) failing to see how the spiritual could interact with the physical. Both are clearly fallacious as I’ve stated them, but I’ve yet to find a substantially fuller, non-fallacious expression of either. Now, I’ve blogged on (i) already, and have little to say about either anyway, but I’ve just been reading Lowe (Erkenntnis 65, 5–23), who put (ii) as follows (2006: 7, 11):

[...] according to Descartes, whereas the mind has beliefs, desires, and volitions, but no shape, size, or velocity, the body has shape, size, and velocity, but no beliefs, desires, or volitions. [...] it is often complained that it is completely mysterious how an unextended, non-physical substance could have any causal impact upon the body – the presumption being, perhaps, that any cause of a physical event must either be located where that event is, or at least be related to it by a chain of events connecting the location of the cause to the location of the effect.

As put, the problem seems to be one of mere conceptual possibility, which is easily answered. By typing into your keyboard you can make virtual beings move about in cyberspace. Clearly you don’t have to be where they are, in cyberspace, to be able to move them about. So it isn’t so very mysterious how such things are possible. And even if it were, why presume that would be a problem for dualism, rather than a personal failing?
......As Lowe notes, people said that Newtonian action-at-a-distance was completely mysterious, and maybe it was, and is, but there was hardly any argument there against Newtonian physics (except in the minds of some philosophers). The truth turned out to be far weirder again, and it was to be had by working through Newtonian physics. There is that other problem, of how exactly the interaction works, but the way towards answering that is the relatively hard way of science, and why should it not go through Cartesian dualism?
......My analogy only worked because of the causal link between your fingers moving on the keyboard and the consequent virtual motion (as expressed in actual space on the screen), which goes via continuous paths in space (if we include force-fields in our ontology), but still, it did work. It suggests that a possible Cartesian response is to give the body, not only a spatial location, but also another, non-spatial location, at which the soul acts. How plausible is that? In the natural theistic context of Cartesian dualism, it’s very plausible, since God created space, and is himself located elsewhere.
......And suppose that Cartesian dualism is false. Then there’s some other true theory of mind. Somehow the physical brain, which changes its form and its atomic constituents continually, is associated with a subjective unit (the mind, which we know directly), which is continuously the same person. So if there could be a non-Cartesian theory, then there’s some way of associating with the physical brain a unique continuant of some sort. It is only to that that the Cartesian theory has to associate a soul. And a very simple and natural (in the Cartesian context) way to do that would be by divine stipulation, God associating each such brain-correlate with a unique soul.
......In many ways that’s far simpler and more natural than the sort of Humean regularity approach to scientific laws that philosophers are often led to by considering how mysterious are nomological necessities (a consideration that most scientists rightly ignore). If souls are possible, then they would have individual existences, in some logical space (say heaven), and would interact in some way (say via spiritual bodies). And if so then matter would’ve been created to be such as could be used in such ways (for some reason). The details are for scientific discovery, but the mere possibility is not really so mysterious.

The Pope and the Archbishop

I just noticed, as I wrote that last post, the Pope on the TV saying more stuff against homosexuality, which is best seen in the context of what the Archbishop of Canterbury was saying a few days ago, about borrowing our way out of a mess that we got into via greedy borrowing being a bit like what alcoholics do. That mess was, I think, more to do with who the City employed and why; but still, why did we let them get away with it? And why'll we probably do the same again? The thing about homosexuality is that it's very emotive. I'm sure the Pope isn't unaware that he's pandering to homophobia, even if he talks about the sin and not the sinner. After all, a similar sin is thinking lustful thoughts about a woman other than one's wife, e.g. when watching a movie (which a lot will be doing this xmas). Marriages tend to break up because they are felt to be falling short of the dream, not because gays come out of closets. And a worse sin is pride, of course; especially pride in such trivia as being straight, or white. The thing about homophobia is that it's obviously like racism and antisemitism etc. People, even straight people, often feel insecure about their sexuality (as the Church has traditionally encouraged them to), and a way to feel better about it with very little subjectively obvious psychic cost (if one's straight) is to think to yourself that at least you're not one of those disgusting gays. The similarities with racism and poor people's views of their own social positions are obvious (not to mention the Church's traditional role in antisemitism). A man can know that he's sexist and letcherous, but comfort himself with the thought that at least he fancies women. And a woman can know that she's fat and lazy, but comfort herself with the thought that at least she's a woman. The irony is that the Church traditionally regarded marriage as second-best to the monastic life (and another irony is that the latter attracted homosexuals, of course... I could go on, but I'll just wish you a merry xmas :)

How We Reason

*......Either Jane is kneeling by the fire and she is looking at the TV, or else Mark is standing at the window and he is peering into the garden.

*......Jane is kneeling by the fire.

Does it follow that she is looking at the TV?
......Most individuals say, “yes”, see Walsh, C., and Johnson-Laird, P.N. (2004: Co-reference and reasoning. Memory & Cognition, 32, 96–106). Given the first premise, they think of two possibilities: in one, the first conjunction is true; and in the other, the second conjunction is true. They overlook that when the second conjunction is true, the first conjunction is false, and that one way in which it can be false is when only its first clause is true, i.e., Jane is kneeling by the fire but not looking at the TV. Hence, the correct answer to the question is: “no”.

That’s from ‘How We Reason: A view from Psychology’ in The Reasoner 2(3), 4–5. Philip Johnson-Laird’s book ‘How We Reason’ is out in paperback next month.
......Maybe that was an example of a fallacy, rather than a paradox, but I’ve labelled it under ‘paradox’ in view of how easy it is to see through those I’ve been looking at recently; and after all, I’d said “yes” myself. (There’s a nice list of fallacies in The Reasoner 2(5), 7–8.)

The Possibility of Free Will

Consider a real object in the world around you, e.g. a brown chair. Maybe the chair is really made of atoms, but if so then that underlying chair is not so much brown as capable of reflecting photons in certain ways. And since there is only one chair not two, out there in the real world—where you can see that the brown chair is—so there is no atomic chair. But of course, we need not become Idealists for that reason.
......Why should there not be many different but equally sound ways of regarding things? That there appears to be a puzzle may just be due to our being in the world that we are thinking about. So we might expect greater puzzles when thinking about ourselves, due to our being them identically. Therefore the following argument—that we couldn’t have morally significant free wills—shouldn’t convince us that we don’t.
......The argument is that, whatever a free choice between at least two alternatives—say, X and Y—is, either something beyond one’s power to choose determines that choice or else nothing does. One chooses, say, X; but why? If some reason for choosing X appealed to one, then something in one’s nature must have been predisposed to be so appealed to (and if that thing was chosen, then the regress just goes one step back, to why one so chose), but if nothing does then one’s choice was made randomly, irrationally, irresponsibly and so forth.

The Action of Free Will

Materialism, in its most plausible forms (e.g. property dualism, cf. this old crosspost), implies that something like micro-psychokinesis should be observable, via the likelihood of Gaia as a self-aware wielder of such of its parts as us, self-aware and language (and other tool) using as we are; because if we are purely material, if matter is such that amongst its properties it includes those that give rise to us as we are—much as sunlight is such that amongst its properties it includes those that allow lasers to blast rocks to smithereens—then it is surely indicated, by our existence, that a more complex and unitary structure such as the Earth’s ecosphere would be more like the goddess Gaia than, say, a car or a crystal.
......Similarly theism, in its most plausible form (e.g. as indicated by the most plausible theodicy), indicates that something akin to micro-psychokinesis would occur within living brains, if not elsewhere, as the soul-brain interaction. Reports of such things as micro-psychokinesis are therefore most interesting philosophically, because their empirical details should have—or so one might expect upon reflection upon what we know pretty well nowadays—the potential to discriminate between the most plausible materialisms (not, e.g., Humean supervenience) and theisms (not, e.g., Islamist fundamentalism). It is therefore sociologically interesting that there is so little professional interest in making rigorously objective observations of such things, even though there are reports by scientists of such things.
......How many other ways are there, whereby 'collapse' and 'no-collapse' interpretations of Quantum mechanics could be distinguished (the true from the false) empirically? If there was micro-psychokinesis then minds would not just be occupying slices through a world described by the wave function, since in that latter case the external events would have to seem random to us. A possible reason why there is a lack of professional scientific interest in such experiments is that 'collapse' interpretations seem to need an observer external to the entire physical universe, e.g. a God, and many scientists prefer to presume that there is no such being. They would say that since there is no such being, so 'collapse' interpretations are false, and hence there is no micro-psychokinesis to look for. Really a rather unscientific attitude (hardly letting the world itself tell you what is true of it).

Being there

She couldn't just tell him to go away, or ignore him. That would have been so much easier for her. But he was a seventeen-year-old human being with feelings; just like everyone else he had never asked to be born – no matter the strange nature of his birth. He deserved to be treated with consideration and respect.

That's from The Temporal Void (p. 721), but I'm wondering about the implicit implication: had we asked to be born, would we not deserve consideration and/or respect? Or is it that nothing can ask to exist, since there is nothing anything can do before it exists, and everything deserves consideration? (I wonder because I think I can show that it is likely that we did ask to be born, if not for whatever bad luck has befallen us.) And what if someone did ask to be born (e.g. Jesus, maybe), would they not deserve consideration (e.g. if they fell victim to malice)?

Presuming Personhood

Watching WALL-E, the best thing at the cinema this summer (and a decent argument against slavish adherence to 700-year-old authority), I suddenly noticed how the humans in it (who resembled jelly-beans) were just cartoons.
......It had been easy to see the cartoon robots as robots to begin with, and as WALL-E clowned around he was touching, e.g. when watching a video of realistic humans, and imitating them. But when the cartoon captain saw the same video I suddenly noticed how he was less than the blob he was in the film (which at that point in the film, he was transcending) and was an ‘it,’ was just lines and colours; and so I became involuntarily aware that I was just watching cartoons (fortunately only fleetingly aware). That dissociation being quasi-trippy, I winded up recalling how we naturally presume that something is a fellow person, when we are young.
......When we grow up, we may think of that as naive, as wrong; but is it? It is not that we ever apply positive criteria for personhood; we rather learn when things fail to be people. Inanimate things fail by being unconscious, and some animals may fail by being amoral, for example. The problem is that if we could know enough about the mechanical or random sources of anyone’s behaviour, we would stop thinking of that one as a person (fortunately we would blink, and involuntarily represume personhood, whatever we knew).
......I’m left wondering if we should define ‘person’ so, what do you think? If atheism is true, we would (probably) have evolved some vague and fluid criteria for personhood, and if theism then the fundamental entity is (probably) a perfect person, and personhood an objectively indefinable primitive (for us).

Tri-via

(a) The Best Visual Illusion of 2008 appears today (also interesting, a Window-shade illusion; not to mention the checkerShadow). [b] Almost stimulating, was simulated sex with a snail (an easy illusion, since Isabella looks like a bank manager); also awesomely, Galaxies collide. <c> How science works (comically), and how it categorically does not (lolly); also, the nature of the Catastrophe (more lolly).

Haiku; by who?

......Yellow butterfly
fluttering—fluttering on
......over the ocean.

The best haiku ever (at least in translation)—I read it years ago and cannot now recall who wrote it (and Google was unusually unenlightening); does anyone out here know?

Determination and Determinism

Why is the Two Envelopes paradox paradoxical? After some thought I've decided that I don't really know (so the following is less clear than I'd hoped it would be) but maybe the reason is related to our difficulties with such concepts as deliberation and probability. Perhaps we overlook (for some reason) something that we intuit easily enough in the case of, for example, Pascal’s Wager:
......Even were you totally unsure, whether or not there was a God, it would clearly be silly to act as though God probably existed just because (even if you did know that) the net rewards for doing so were very much greater than those for not doing so. Intuitively, such rewards are irrelevant if there is no genuine chance of whichever is not already the case (if it is not as if someone will toss a fair coin fairly, and give you those rewards on heads)—and that is, I think, reminiscent of the calculation (see my previous post) of the expected gain on exchanging your envelope (when only one of the ‘X’s in the equation for expected gain named the definite amount in your envelope). Such a distinction, between genuine and other chances, is obscure but apposite (cf. Denyer's 'proof,' below) because whenever we are thinking rationally we have already presupposed that our decisions might make a genuine difference.
......After all, with your original choice of envelope (which gave you the 50% chance of X = 1 and 50% chance of X = 2) there was no temptation to wonder how it could be that, whilst X = 3/2 is impossible, 50% of X (= 1) + 50% of X (= 2) = 3/2. And those chances were genuine (so to speak; and even if, counterfactually, your envelope had been given to you, via some deterministic mechanism, your epistemic uncertainty would have yielded a similarly quasi-genuine, if then entirely imaginary, chanciness). By contrast, the chances that seemed paradoxical, when focusing upon just part of what you know (when ignoring the parenthetical identities in the equation below for expected gain on exchange), could have measured nothing more than your ignorance about what was already the case.
......Regarding that possibility (that ‘could’), it seems (as below) that simply to be rational is to have (rather obscurely) related presuppositions about what is possible—beliefs so obscure (so analytically dubious) that we might well overlook their import when a scenario encourages us to (and plausibly the way in which that happens within the two envelopes scenario is a clue as to how to analyse such beliefs). Similarly, we might presuppose that (certainly) 2 + 2 = 4, even those of us who think that a (Cartesian) demon, fooling us about such things, is not just possible (despite its inconsistency with 2 + 2 = 4) but is not necessarily unlikely. And if determinism is like that, if its nonexistence is a necessary presupposition of the practice of our rationality (for all that various determinisms are prima facie possible), then the fact that possible worlds are, in themselves, rather deterministic objects (whereas in no possible world is it false that 2 + 2 = 4) might help to account for why philosophers (who have tended to favour possible worlds analyses) have tended to find the Two Envelopes so paradoxical (cf. Pascal being a deterministic Jansenist, which might explain his view of his Wager).
......So maybe the answer (to why we find the two envelopes so paradoxical) has something to do with the following argument (inspired by Denyer's "Time, Action & Necessity") for free will (and against Stephen Law's most recent argument). Many Naturalists believe that there are, in reality, such relativistic particles and fields as are the subject-matter of physics, and that what the other subjects (biochemistry, psychology, politics and so forth) concern themselves with are really just relatively large chunks of that. Many Naturalists also believe that, given how much we know, from such sciences, it would be irrational to believe in such things as souls and revelations; and they think that it would, of course, be wrong to be irrational.
......Thinking is important (we can all agree, at least here). Coming to the right decision is important—it should not just be a random event, choosing what to think about the real world, of real people (many Naturalists are humanists too). One could be irrational, but that would be wrong. And thinking rationally (making a responsible decision on the basis of the evidence) cannot be something that you are bound to do, in a totally determined way, if it is something that you might neglect to do, could be at fault for not doing. Naturalists arguing against the possibility of religious knowledge are, in particular, very aware of the ‘ought’ in ‘thought;’ and ought implies can—there would be little point in arguing against irrational beliefs if believers are bound to believe as they do, as would be the case were the physics of their physicalistic minds deterministic.
......But the only alternative to determinism, in this physical universe (of which we know a vast amount, thanks to modern physics), is randomness; if there is another alternative, and if mind is reducible to physics, then it’s odd that we don't know about it in modern physics (which has even revealed to us the relativity of space and time). And how could mere randomness be the cause of the difference between a moral act (thinking properly) and an immoral act (thinking improperly); how could it be that we should try to get result A rather than B, if it is just random whether A or B? So (to end with my reply to Law) the very rationality that Naturalists are fond of opposing to religious knowledge presupposes something that cannot be either of the options (determinism or randomness) available to them, as physicalistic atheists; so that, according to their own scientific standards, all the evidence available to us, at any time, must be evidence between the major alternatives (such as some modern monotheisms).

Go with the Flow...

...it's what a dead fish would do! Speaking of fishy things, what would a Naturalistic picture of the mind look like? Would the mind be, basically, the brain processing information about the body's surroundings; that information being a bit like the copy (not the paint) in some painting of some external pattern caused by the (bearer of the) latter, much as I see the Moon because that image was caused by the Moon?
......But the Moon also causes the tides, whose patterns therefore resemble those of the Moon's orbit; and while the brain processes its information, estuaries do channel tidal waters between banks that are shaped, in part, by those very waters. And while the brain has evolved, to be a relatively stable system, so have land masses (without river-dragons perceiving pearls, presumably). The thing is, the structure of a physical process is just a set (of spatio-temporal correlations)...
......So we could find isomorphic structures (e.g. of a brain's mind momentarily believing that, since there is believing, hence there is a believer) physically instantiated within land masses (e.g. as a subset of the chemical structure); and so it seems that the only reason why materialistic theories of mind are not in serious trouble is that they don't actually exist (as actual theories). And since they don't, we can't actually apply Occam's razor to the extra-physical bits (not without losing a lot of predictive power).
......Now, there are other approaches to mind, but the scientific way to judge between property and substantial dualism would be to compare what they suggest (about the extra aspects of the world) with what the world itself indicates (we should test apposite aspects, of course; psychical and parapsychological researchers have tended not to). So, whereas property dualism seems to suggest a lot of empathic communion, a natural ease to telepathic exchanges of information (at least wherever brains had not evolved to block it), such as should be noticable were it there, do we actually find that?
......No, whereas substantial dualism suggests (since our quantum-mechanically physical brains are somehow affected by our choices) that we should expect micro-psychokinetic effects (more than telepathic ones, if our souls are as distinct as they seem to be) in living brains, which would naturally be more obscure. Maybe such effects could also be observed (less naturally, but then we are creative creatures) in other physical systems, although such things (unlike spoon-benders and poltergeists) have yet to be investigated properly (even though such effects are essentially controllable); but why? (Is it that Naturalism is unscientific?)