Free will
Hi,
I'm brand new and don't know if this is where I should be posting but I would so much love to have a discussion about free will with someone. It's a particular subject that I struggle with as a religious person but at the same time can't find an argument that is satisfying to disprove it. If anyone would like to converse about it or send me in the direction of other discussions, I would be very grateful.
Thanks,
Dan
I'm brand new and don't know if this is where I should be posting but I would so much love to have a discussion about free will with someone. It's a particular subject that I struggle with as a religious person but at the same time can't find an argument that is satisfying to disprove it. If anyone would like to converse about it or send me in the direction of other discussions, I would be very grateful.
Thanks,
Dan
Comments (229)
In a religious context, which actually vary greatly, you can expect to include more logic than doctrine here or you'll see receive the wet rope treatment I can assure you. :grin:
Generally from what discussions I can recall from here they seem to revolve around specific doctrines stating or essentially resolving to "everything is predetermined" .. essentially no longer a religious debate but more of one about determinism in general. Is this perhaps what you mean?
You want to disprove that free will exists? Or disprove that it doesn’t exist?
I wish to see a compelling argument that makes thinking of free will as a possibility without the use of some outside power.
If you were predetermined to do something and so did it, is that free will?
If your decision was entirely random is that free will?
If it’s neither, then are you looking for a decision that is not determined and at the same time not random? Does that even make sense? I don’t think it does.
Thank you for the response but I guess that answer is less than fulfilling for me personally. From everything I've seen and been taught, our universe is that of cause and effect. That means that every decision(or effect) is the result of something before it(the cause). If that's true everything has been decided. It's unsettling which is why I posit the question to this forum.
I suppose my terms are that no decision is random ergo, no decision is truly free because it is the direct consequence of something that happened before.
This is fundamentally what I can't disprove. I hope that makes sense.
If you roll a dice and get 3, did you choose to get 3? Assuming the dice is actually fully random.
I accept that to my limited understanding of physics and in relation to my own outlook it is random but that doesn't mean it is, does it? I mean there was a reason, whether the way the dice came out of the hand or the way it bounced because of the type of wood or amount of force, that it came up 3. I feel like that's just fact. Not to mention why did the person roll the dice to begin with.
I am not defending scientists who as you say might be awarding themselves Nobel Prizes. I'm just looking at simple scientific method that dates back long before the invention of the Nobel Prize. I am trying to make a choice. My question is, is that choice really mine.
Determinism is a belief. There is no scientific basis for it. Believe what you choose to believe.
Otherwise, if you can’t shake the determinism off (and there are some that say QM don’t mean the world isn’t deterministic on a macro scale) then you should go into compatibilism the belief that determinism and free will are compatible.
Let me ask you this: If you were locked in a cell, and the guards told you one day “we are removing the door to your cell, but we will shoot you on site if you try to leave, and our snipers never miss” will you have become any more free?
I not sure how I missed this comment since it was the first lol. I'm not intending to get into any kind of religious or spiritual argument. Mine is more of my observance of the universe as I understand it. Based on cause and effect which makes me think that we don't have free will in that context. That's why I wanted to make sure I didn't want an outside influence to sway the discussion. Thank you for responding.
Ok :) Why?
I'm not sure I understand the point of the question you asked at the end of your post but I don't think I would be anymore free than I was before they took the doors off. I might be missing something though so I'm sorry if I am sounding ignorant.
As for your other statement is it possible that quantum mechanics are only seemingly random because of our own ignorance about how things work?
I guess I think that my mind created this question to ask because of something else that happened before to make me wonder.
I'm really not trying to be contradictory I swear. I'm just troubled by this thought and wanted to see if other people had some insight that seemed satisfactory. I really do appreciate the conversation so much!
Good. Then I know you’re not being biased.
Quoting Barondan
Well, before the doors were taken off, you had no ability to leave. IE, determinism. After they were taken off you had the ability to leave but you would get shot if you do. IE, indeterminism, but you would never do the act in question.
So it seems that determinism and indeterminism are not the issue here. It seems that “freedom” does not increase when you get the ability to do things you would never do anyways. Maybe the variable that matters is whether or not the thing you’re doing is what you want to do.
So maybe a more accurate definition of free will is “Doing what you want to do without outside influence”. In that case, whether or not the world is deterministic shouldn’t be a problem. It would be like whether or not the door is there. Doesn’t matter, you wouldn’t want to leave either way.
Quoting Barondan
I think there was a paper stating that, no, quantum randomness is fully random and not due to our ignorance. How that would be proven is beyond me. But physicists on a whole also seem to think this. That quantum randomness is true randomness, not just ignorance.
I really appreciate this response khaled. I'm gonna have to think over what you said and also try and find this paper you speak of. I'm not sure I agree yet but that's kind of the point of philosophical debates lol. You have given me a better answer than anyone else I've ever spoken with about it.
My names Dan and I hope we can speak more in the future.
I agree. I'm starting to believe that what makes life indeterministic is that we believe we have free will and have a will to prosper. I associate it with spirituality.
What makes life indeterministic is surrendering our free will or not believing we have it to surrender in the first place.
This is the point where free will stands heavy in its position. Sometimes we tend to think and work that everything around us can be controlled by our own skills and behaviour. If you believe you can change the situation with effort it makes living the life a worthy and beautiful feeling as @MondoR well said previously.
Nevertheless, this can make a good debate inside of free will (I do not want go for a tangent) and determinism. I guess if you put more emphasis in your own circumstances and trying to get a “better” situation you somehow make “determinism” weak because you have the control of present and what could the future holds.
So it is interesting how free will can be/or not be a good example of how to face predetermined criteria.
My personal view differs from the conventional in that I don't believe that free will should be concerned with the possibility of non-determinism, be it material or otherwise. It should be concerned with human agency.
For example, if I do something bad and you do something good to repair the damage, my action has provoked your counteraction. Your character demanded it, and now I have learned how to provoke you again. I will do something bad again and you will do something good to repair the damage again. Is that lack of free will? I don't believe so. Why? Because you act consistently with your personality, which seeks and attains involvement in the outcome.
In other words, to define free will, one has to think not solely about stimuli and responses, but about the participation of a character/personality that achieves its goals. As long as the individual is not confused factually about the nature of their involvement in a situation, and their personal agency acts as a determining factor in the outcome, then they are exercising their freedom. If they act under someone's command or are forced by factors that are beyond the scope of their personality/identity. they are not manifesting in correspondence with their character, and are not free.
But there are many obvious cognitive parameters that will be involved there. For example, a patient with mental illness might have difficulty creating consistent character and behavior, i.e. personality, and therefore will be at odds with exercising any freedom. Non-determinism wouldn't help at all, because it would only blur the presence of agency even further.
I have stated before, that if I was having a theist inclination, it would be pantheist/panpsychist. The hypothesis will be that I may be completely embodied, including all my consciousness. You can see how that creates a problem, since matter is governed by laws of nature, and many people will describe the freedom as either hanging on non-determinism in those laws or not being present at all, but I wouldn't. For a pantheist (even dystheistic one), the material laws, as grotesque as their consequences to human beings might be in terms of suffering and dissatisfaction (which is why people think of them as too profane to be the sole carrier for consciousness), are not necessarily unspirited. They are merely inhumane, because when given the latitude to evolve to high-entropy outcomes, which is the most frequently encountered condition in nature, they cause decay of organization and collide with our need for sustenance, our desire to apply our ethics and ideals. Consequently, the only counterbalancing factor is that nature is being sculpted by the interactions of low-entropy lifeforms like ourselves with their external environment, giving a properly justified perception that we are bound by nature and fighting it, rather then facilitated by it.
Our self-recognized, even if affected by genetics and development, boundaries are such that there is express conflict between the nature within and the nature without. This conflict makes us reject the universe as taking part in our free will, because it symbolizes pain and decay, the chaos, the enemy.
In reality, we are practicing those boundaries flexibly and they are emergently psychological, not always clearly physically defined. Outside of ideological discussions like this one, in routine life, people associate themselves with their body, but an ailing body part, such as a cancerous organ, might feel as a predatory hostile agency, while a separate person, such a family member might feel as an organic connection that we have with the world. For pantheism/panpsychism/naturalism, the natural law is not only limitation of who you are, it is description of all there is, and part of it is you, and other parts are distinct from you, and many of them are hostile to you and contest your existence, restricting your self-realization. Being able to realize yourself in the world, as you are currently determined, and to govern the outcome according to your convictions and/or need for personal satisfaction is having freedom. Free will is having your coherent personality behind this realization.
The question of FreeWill came up in a thread on Religious Belief. One common modern "scientific" argument against Freewill in general (not specifically religious choice) is the findings of Benjamin Libet's experiments on voluntary acts. A common interpretation of those results was to conclude that the body had already chosen to act before the mind became conscious of its own intention to act. Hence, "freewill is an illusion". But Libet himself left open the possibility of minimal freedom, in the form of a final conscious Veto of the body's subconscious decision to act. For me, that narrowly-limited-freedom-to-choose is sufficient to validate our intuitive feeling of moral & functional Freedom. It's what I call "FreeWill within Determinism".
I'm not sure what you meant by "outside power". Are you referring to a divine gift of Free Will? My notion of Freewill is not based on any scriptural authority, but on the role of Randomness in Evolution. My later post on that same thread gives my reasoning. :smile:
FWIW, here's a link to my reply on the Religious Belief thread : https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/503419
Conscious-will could thus affect the outcome of the volitional process even though the latter was initiated by unconscious cerebral processes. Conscious-will might block or veto the process, so that no act occurs.The existence of a veto possibility is not in doubt.
___Benjamin Libet, the 'freewill' experiment
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/551587e0e4b0ce927f09707f/t/57b5d269e3df28ee5e93936f/1471533676258/Libet%2C+Do+We+Have+Free+Will%3F.pdf
Rationalism versus Fatalism : Freewill Within Determinism
http://bothandblog2.enformationism.info/page67.html
PS___Here's a discussion on "apparent randomness :
Apparent randomness is strong evidence for the existence of free will :
https://www.kialo.com/apparent-randomness-is-strong-evidence-for-the-existence-of-free-will-5685.2309?path=5685.0~5685.1-5685.2309
Let me help you out Dan, you said "It's unsettling which is why I posit the question to this forum." you are absolutely right the "free" will you've been hearing about your life doesn't exist nor it ever did exist, the reason you posted this question on this forum is because you were waiting for someone to tell you that you are right. I've been thinking about same thing for last few years and came to conclusion that we make very few choices in our life, people think every day they have a choice, but they don't and not only that, but when you finally do make a "choice" it's predetermined by your environment.
The values of human were decided long before human was ever "created" and if you are wondering when you roll a dice, is it random? I like to look at this way, it's undeterministic till the point dice stops rolling, but you think to yourself did person throw it random speed? or when he was a kid watched television show, watched person roll a dice and it was set rooted in his memory on how to throw that dice? or was it thrown harder because he ate 10 minutes before rolling a dice? and did he choose to eat 10 minutes before throwing dice because next to casino was fresh baked bread that made his neurons thirsty for sugar? was that fresh baked bread baked at random point? or was it all planed long before player came into casino?
You have to understand one thing no matter what you think you can do it will be done by someone, if you kill yourself tomorrow, someone will fulfill your spot and finish where you started. What do I mean by that? think of it this way, universe doesn't care if '3' or '6' will be on a dice, he cares about who throws it, what happens after it has been thrown, who picks up dice, the reason for throwing dice.
When you extend your notion of self to the very surface of your being, beyond the little homunculus we often pretend is there, you’ll find that the “outer forces” are often your own. The thing that causes the heartbeat, the metabolism, the immune system to do what they do is none other than yourself. All conscious and unconscious activity is determined, “willed” by this being. This being persists in all anterior, present and posterior events throughout your time here.
I have never encountered a good argument against free will, only bad ones.
The main bad one appeals to causal determinism. Causal determinism is the thesis that everything that occurs was necessitated to occur by prior events and the laws of nature. Many think this thesis is incompatible with our having free will (as you may know already, they are known as incompatibilists). And some incompatibilists also think determinism is true (again, as you may already know, they are known as hard determinists).
But there is no good argument for hard determinism. Here's the main argument:
1. If causal determinism is true, then we do not have free will
2. Causal determinism is true
3. Therefore we do not have free will
Both premises are questionable. Niether is self evident to our reason. Yet they are being used to refute a much less questionable premise that is self evident to our reason, namely 'we have free will'.
These are undeniably stronger arguments:
A1. If causal determinism is true, then we do not have free will
A2. We have free will
A3. Therefore causal determinism is false
B1. Causal determinism is true
B2. We have free will
B3. Therefore causal determinism is true and we have free will.
Argument A gives us libertarianism (the combination of incompatibilism and a belief in free will), and argument B gives us compatibilism (the combination of free will and determinism).
Both libertarianism and compatibilism are, then, more plausible views than hard determinism.
Someone has mentioned indeterminism above. But that's a red herring. Indeterminism can't provide free will as it doesn't prevent everything one does fron tracing to external causes (an in deterministic cause is still a cause). All it does is render ones decisions indeterministic, but that doesn't make them any free than they would be if they were determined.
Quoting simeonz
Quoting Bartricks
So to Barondan, I'm quoting these other people for emphasis. There's a generic tendency to equate predictability of choice to lack of choice; but there's something mightily suspicious about this tendency.
Quoting Gnomon
Quoting NOS4A2
To Gnomon (and Barondan), I think Libet's veto hypothesis is naive; there's a much more fundamental flaw in the will skeptic analysis based on the underlying presumptions. The general underlying assumption is that there's a "decision making" part of us, and that that "decision making" part must be the "conscious part" (this is what NOS4A2 I believe is talking about and calls the homunculus). But that violates even our own subjective experiences of how choices work. When I type a long sentence I generally type exactly what I mean to type, for example, but it doesn't subjectively appear to me as if I deliberate on the entire sentence. Rather, I'm only consciously aware vaguely of the intent, and of chunks of phrases coming to me as I type them. Somehow once the entire sentence comes out, it winds up following all of the rules of grammar and also winds up being what I meant to type. In other words, there are some problems with the generic presumption that the "consciousness" part of our mind is the "us" part. NOS4A2 I think is touching on this very thing.
Barondan: I'm both sketching an argument and quoting others here who have their own thoughts to demonstrate that my views here aren't simply some pet theory I've come up with... there seems to be problems in the general free will debate with the underlying presumptions we make about the nature of choice and the nature of the self. The real point here isn't to convince you that free will works that way, but rather to convince you that you should be looking very carefully at the fundamental assumptions people tend to make by default and make sure those are actually valid.
I'm not doing that - where have I done that?
I make decisions. The decisions are mine. I have made them. That's the default. Causes must have origins. I originate my decisions.
What would deprive me of free will? Accurately predict my decisions? How would that work?
I have a coffee every morning. That's a free decision I make. But its predictable.
Let me say that I think there is nothing anyone - save God - can do to deprive me of free will. For to deprive me of free will you would need to make me into a created thing, rather than an uncreated one. How are you doing to do that?
Relax Bartricks... I'm not refuting you; you've been quoted as an example of someone who agrees with me. (At least wrt choice).
Speaking for myself, I must report no progress at all in my investigations into the matter except for one small detail which is best illustrated through scenarios:
Imagine a person, X, who has been offered a choice of fizzy drink between a can of Pepsi and a can of Coke. Consider now that this person is, in scenario 1, simply presented with the two drinks and is asked to choose. However, in scenario 2 a gun is pointed at X's temple and he's asked to pick up the Coke can and not the Pepsi can.
Clearly there's a difference between scenarios 1 and 2 with respect to freedom of choice. In scenario 2, X is under duress to pick up the Coke can but in scenario 1, X is not under any coercion to do so. It's my hunch that such scenarios, which are realistic as in they do occur in real life albeit in different contexts, are the reason why people are under the impression that they have free will.
Note that this, in no way, proves that free will exists because scenario 1 doesn't demonstrate that we weren't compelled by factors other than a gun to the temple - our preference for any particular brand of fizzy drink maybe something we have no control over. Nevertheless...it does provide, in my humble opinion, some kind of an intuition or explanation/reason for why people believe they're free.
I think Free Will exists. Even when taking Libet's experiments into account, one can argue that a lot of decisions we make in life are not instantaneous. Sometimes they take days, weeks, or even years. For example, if I decide to go to college to improve my chances of employability in the future and make more money, it's a decision that is not instantaneous. It would have formed by quite a bit of information, weighing various options, planning etc. Such decisions do not follow short span that Libet's experiments follow.
Now the question of determinism. At its very elementary level (quantum level) universe seems to be probabilistic. The very building blocks of atoms of our universe are probabilistic in their nature: You can only know either the position of such building block (ie, sub-particles. e.g. Electron, quarks, photon) or their spin (momentum) but never the both at the same time. This behavior is different at classical mechanics level (atoms, molecules, trees, birds, planets, solar system, galaxy, etc). You can know velocity and position at the same moment which allows determinism at their level. Using thought experiments like Laplace's demon, we can conclude that given the ability of knowing velocity and position of every single atom in the universe we can determine how things will turn out to be. The molecules of cosmos already in motion and moving towards a deterministic end though well predictable path of classical mechanics.
How then free will comes into play? Free will becomes relevant at the level of agency of living organisms. Living organisms through their agency disrupt the course of the molecules within the temporal scope of their environment. This agency of living organism is an emergent phenomenon. As we move from very basic level (sub-particle level) of our universe to more granular (atom, molecules), and then further even more complex level (living organisms), certain emergent properties begin to appear that may not directly map to any properties at the previous level but yet have their own reality.
Free will, in my view, is one such phenomenon, or emergent property of reality at our (human, living agent) level. It does not exist at the level where objects of the universe do not have agency but it does exist when an agent comes into picture. So the question of free will exists at a level that determinism does not appear to be a relevant factor since we act in approximation and deterministically as part of the cosmic machine. Our agency does not have full control over the outcomes and hence our efforts (actions) are always approximate. Since we know this nature of approximation of our actions, we are left with trying out variable choices to optimize that approximation for most desirable outcome. This variability in choices gives us free will.
To me the more relevant question is how society can makes us feel more free. Because it seems governments are more powerful than God :)
Then understanding the real situation, I imagine you don't put to much effort into convincing other people otherwise. We are all captives? What's more, Nobel Prizes are somewhat ludicrous, under these circumstances. Essentially, utterances and discoveries have no meaning beyond being an outcome. Pretty interesting, don't you think?
And in your model someone discovering something is not an outcome?
Exactly. It is new insight. Your life is totally meaningless. Enjoy it.
It might be that indeterminism, if there is any, only exists beyond this universe. There doesn't appear to be any way to prove or disprove it.
In Physics, many who strongly believe this universe is deterministic, avoid this unsettling consequence that their lives are just played out, by postulating that we live out our lives in one of many possible scenarios, governed by a universal wave function. If you have ever seen the movie 'Sliding Doors' they see the sliding of the doors as just containing some splitting of a branch into different sets of alternate realities. This is the Many Worlds interpretation of Quantum mechanics.
Those Physicists who believe it is indeterministic will often cite the perceived randomness of outcomes appearing as outcomes derived from chance, or spontaneous interference outside of a deterministic cause to effect an outcome, as though they are probability distributions.
But that is not settled. It's not clear that there is any true indeterminism.
One tonic for those who struggle with these profound implications may be to live their lives more arbitrarily and invite perceived randomness into their lives. You could start by flipping a coin. The coin may land on heads or tails and you may choose to commit some action based on the result.
But proponents of determinism will argue that the coin's flip was not random.
So that just leaves bias. I often find that my bias reveals itself when I commit to flipping a coin. It's as though the act of deciding to flip reveals a slight bias I didn't perceive before, that I have for one of the outcomes if I know the outcomes. Kind o like suddenly it's horse race I have no control over and I feel an interest in backing a winner, whereas before I simply picked the winner. Maybe you could get two empty plastic balls and put a commitment into each one and mix them around or have someone else mix them.
But there is still a hope or preference you have in finding one of the outcomes that effects your choice. You could give a friend full decision over some arbitrary list of activities for the day that you have no say in and under the condition that they are all mundane things you have no preference for. He/She sets the choices for you and you pick one. Now you have no real preference or bias arguably and you just pick purely.
But the argument can still be made that your friend had a preference.
You can of course always still argue the whole sequence of events:
You deciding to introduce some variability into a choice by having your friend pick boring arbitrary things, and both you and your friends deterministic actions led to an inevitable outcome.
You can argue that my hope or will for something to happen is indeterministic. But a proponent of determinism can equally come along and say that even if I do have the power to influence the outcome, it is derived from my deterministically derived will to do so.
Of course it's hard for some and unsettling, that we may have no control whatsoever over our lives, which is one reason why the Many Worlds interpretation is so popular with many people.
Why?
Why does an outcome being determined make it meaningless?
And new insight does not classify as “outcome”? Outcome of years of research and dedication maybe?
Quoting MondoR
Why do you think so? I certainly don’t think so.
Do you actually plan on engaging with new ideas or do you want to spout unsubstantiated nonsense like this?
The insight is the result of a choice by the mind to explore, to learn something new, to create a new idea, and with whom to share it. It is the choice that gives meaning. Otherwise one is just a bowling ball colliding with pins because the Maker [the Big Bang] made all of the decisions at that point in time. The Big Bang gets credit for everything.
Just another form of fatalism.
There are physical laws which determine physical outcomes, but is consciousness physical? The hard problem of what consciousness is and how it arrises, needs to be resolved before one may discount the possibility of free will.
I enjoyed the topic.
I would like to add something in support of indeterminism and thus free will, because as others rightfully point out, determinism sure does appear to be prolific in the universe and probably can account for most of the mechanics we see (certainly at the macroscopic level). General relativity is close to explaining this overall. And, in any event I would accept that overall indeterminacy emerges form a sum of parts which are both deterministic and indeterministic, which I will discuss below.
Although it does appear that the conditions to allow our existence came to be from an unimaginably energetic event a very long time ago (as we perceive time, there is disagreement even about how this unfolded, but agreement around how matter came to be at all, and hence time itself in any meaningful way). Was there only one big bang? Are they cyclical? We don't really know.
Indeterminism is not intuitive and we have a tendency to reject such things as not satisfying our classical understanding of the laws of nature.
An indeterminant process is a stochastic or random process whereby there is some indeterminacy in its future evolution described by probability distributions. This means that even if the initial condition (or starting point) is known, there are many possibilities the process might go to, but some paths may be more probable and others less so. The basic idea is that if you have were to be able to recreate the precise conditions of an experiment right down the last detail, you could still not repeat the results. Some level of randomness would intervene during the manifestation of the outcome to make it unique.
The first thing to acknowledge is that whether the universe is fundamentally deterministic or indeterministic, there are profound implications which can make our heads spin, most notable being for determinism that we would have no genuine free will. And for indeterminism, that paradoxes around the universe being unrealistically disorderly and in defiance of the basic principle of cause and effect, depending on how far you take it.
I do maintain that the universe would still heavily consist of deterministic processes in either case at the macro level and maybe in many processes at the quantum level too, but be overall indeterministic in that the indeterminism pollutes (if you will) the overall evolution of the system to make it stochastic. i.e. a system which is part stochastic must be stochastic overall, at least in this universe as we understand it).
Think of that as 'If I place one dodgy indeterministic domino in a long line of dominoes that behave deterministically, then the overall manifestation of knocking these dominoes is indeterminant.'
It's probably best to focus on the leading argument for indeterminacy in the first place, and that is radioactive decay.
Above, simulation of many identical atoms undergoing radioactive decay, starting with either 4 atoms (left) or 400 (right). The number at the top indicates how many half-lives have elapsed.
This process is the best candidate we have in our observed universe as indeterministic phenomena.
The basic reasoning for radioactive decay being genuinely indeterministic is that the process (as they see it) is not complex enough to create such a complex variance in decay times from atom to atom, for any underlying working to be taking place they don't know about. They rule this out. The generally accepted interpretation is that it decays through a stochastic process, in an indeterministic way. It's not proof. It's evidence.
From an indeterministic viewpoint, it can still be argued that this process still inevitably emerges from the very origin of the universe in an unbreakable chain of deterministic events and that each atom's decay is inevitable. But if so, why do these radioactive atoms bleed off their energy in such an unstable way?
I think this may actually be an indeterministic process. For reasons we don't yet understand, I believe it may be the case that the superset of our universe (that which determines the workings of our universe), if there is one, determines this. It cannot be proven that chance is at work in this decay, but I believe that if chance is involved, it may come from something deeper, something that existed before the big bang as it were.
To suggest that this process may be manifested from outside of our known universe is no more extreme a view than the universal wave function being outside our known universe determining each parallel universe as in the Many Worlds interpretation that a lot of Determinism proponents are so fond of.
I'm not convinced this is the one and only big bang we have had in this universe or that there isn't something outside of our universe, containing it.
Paul,
Could it be that indeterministic nature of a phenomenon (decay in this case) is limited in scope to its temporal locality and occurrence? I believe that when we talk of free will or indeterministic behavior, we are merely talking about a limited scope of such activity within which this behavior is probable and not some continuous chain of event that are somehow connected in a causal relationship.
For example, while entropy of the universe will continue to increase, regardless of what we humans do, and that in itself can be termed as determinism of our universe (heat death of universe), within the scope of our lives, our acts and interactions may "move molecules" in less predictable ways compared if we did not exist. So this less predictability is scoped within the span of human (or sentient beings) existence.
That's not the alternative as I understand it. The alternative is a decision that is not determined by anything other than the self, with the self not being (wholly) determined by anything and the decision being purposeful. (Even a capricious decision is purposeful in the sense I am concerned with (that is, is not random) if it is deliberately chosen).
As I see it, we are the sum of our parts (if not taking any notion of the soul into account).
The indeterministic nature would not be limited in scope due to what we call chaos or non linearity. A subtle manifestation of indeterminism cascades rapidly so that the result is more often much bigger.
We already have random number generators based on radioactive decay. If you were to not leave it up to your immediate locality or the belief that you are truly random in your own right and base some important decisions around the output of a random number generator like this, you could in effect be galvanising an indeterministic future for yourself (that is IF the decay is truly random), but in reality, if there is true indeterminism in decay, then it is likely in other places too, and it would lead to an indeterministic future regardless. I would argue that if there is anything in this universe that that is indeterministic, then your life inevitably will be too, regardless of distance. After epochs of time, even the most isolated indeterministic effect would manifest its effects and alter an otherwise deterministic state.
Here is one such generator. When we listen to these random sounds, are we tuned into true indeterminism?
Determinism and fatalism aren't the same thing. An event that is fated will happen regardless of what occurs. An event that is determined happens because of what occurs. A classic example is that you're sick. If your future health is fated, it doesn't matter if you go to the doctor or not. If it's determined, it does matter.
It's already Determined. There is no choice.
Determinism is a form of fatalism. The only difference is the name given to the Maker.
So the requirements seem to be: Some randomness + deliberation + decision is being made by the self (whatever that is)
Well, we can get deliberation out of the way. Determinism or not, our choices can be deliberate.
And we can get decision is being made by the self out of the way too. Who else would make the decision? Determinism or no determinism, the self will always be the source of decisions. Then again, I suspect we have different definitions of “self”
Finally, the last requirement is ontological randomness. I don’t think this is actually a requirement. Let’s assume for a second that the world is fundamentally indeterministic:
Say you’re a prisoner in a jail cell that you cannot break out of. One day the guard removed the door and says “You’re free to leave but you will be shot if you step foot outside, and our snipers never miss”. Have you just become more free? I don’t think so. I don’t think gaining the ability to do something you would never do is an increase in freedom.
Before the door was removed, you had no choice. You could not have chosen to leave if you wanted to. That’s determinism. After it was removed you had a choice, IE indeterminism, but you would never want to leave anyways. And yet you were no more free. So the variable that seems to matter is not whether or not you can ACTUALLY choose differently. As here is an example where you are just as free being unable to choose as when having a choice.
Point is: I don’t think freedom is incompatible with determinism. What matters is whether or not you’re doing what you want to do. Not whether or not you can actually do otherwise.
Evidence? It could just be that the insight is a result of atoms bumping into each other.
As usual you make unsubstantiated claims. You’ve been doing it since the start of the thread. The answer to “Do we have free will” can’t simply be an unsubstantiated “Yes”. You need to support your argument.
Quoting MondoR
Possible.
Quoting MondoR
Why would it? You are willing to give credit to a literal explosion than to give it to the group of atoms that is most influential to the insight (the scientists)?
Of course. One can choose to believe any story they wish.
You choose to be a balling ball thrown by the Maker.
I choose to be a Creator making choices.
In life, we all make choices, and we learn from them.
When have I said that? I don’t know if the world is deterministic or not. Again, unsubstantiated claims and oversimplification.
And in either case, what makes you think either of those leads to freedom?
Quoting MondoR
Again, unsubstantiated claim. You could merely be feeling like you’re choosing. You can’t dodge the problem by saying “Why yes I have a choice” over and over.
“It feels that way therefore it must be that way”
Quoting MondoR
There is plenty of substantiation for it. Physics for one is deterministic. Or can be at least
Quoting MondoR
Maybe. But notice how your argument changed from “The world is not deterministic” to “No reason to believe the world is deterministic”
The latter is much easier to make.
And regardless, even if this were true and the world was indeterministic, how does that result in free will? How does adding some randomness help? You seem to think that establishing indeterminism is equivalent to establishing that we have free will.
There is zero evidence that physics is deterministic. By all accounts, it is probabilistic. However, you can believe so if you wish. That is what makes life interesting.
I didn't make an argument that there is choice. On the contrary, I stated they is no way of knowing one way or the other. It is just a personal, spiritual decision that one makes on how they wish to think of their life. Some picture themselves as bowling balls, others as marionettes, and others as personal creators. We are all actors on this earth, playing roles.
If we are making choices, then we have meaning.
False.
Quoting MondoR
Or it could only feel that way while not being a decision at all. That is the matter in question in this thread. Repeatedly saying “it is a choice” does not make it so.
Quoting MondoR
All of these picture are compatible with determinism. They’re just attitudes.
......
I mean that the future state is a function of the current state, as opposed to fatalism, where the current state is irrelevant to the future state.
Quoting MondoR
Why not?
Quoting MondoR
Nope; there's a clear difference.
Fatalism:
Nostradamus predicts he and his host will eat the black pig. The host then orders his chef to prepare the white pig. As the chef begins to prep the kitchen, a wolf sneaks in and steals the white pig. The chef, left with only a black pig, prepares that.
Nostradamus can say what happens and it must be true, because things are fated.
Determinism:
The outcome depends on the input. Nostradamus cannot win.
Nostradamus predicts he and his buddy will eat a black pig. The host chooses to oblige. Everyone is happy.
Humans can be very creative with explanations for anything. Mythology never dies. Just changes in form. You can believe the bowling ball story or the marionette story, or whatever variation you wish. That the beauty of being human. Enormous creativity.
I don't agree that freedom is compatible with determinism; I've heard plenty of people claim it is so and yet they are never able to explain how it could be. If all events were deterministic in the fullest sense, then every event down to the smallest detail was inevitable moments after the Big Bang (assuming for the sake of argument that the current origin theory is correct). That would mean all our acts and decisions have been predetermined from the beginning of time.
As I see it, the possibility to have done otherwise is essential in order to count decisions as being determined by the self. That's the freedom required for moral responsibility as it is usually understood. Otherwise our acts would be just like natural phenomena, just as inevitable. No one counts the lightning as being morally responsible when it kills someone.
Schopenhauer (a deterministic) said something like: 'we are free to do what we want, but we are not free to want what we want'. This would mean we are compelled to do what we want to, unless some other, stronger desire countermands it. If I want to murder a child, then I will do it unless some other desire, say the desire not to be imprisoned, is stronger. But under determinism I have no control over what my desires are, and which are going to be the stronger in any situation. So, how can I be held morally responsible for something that was never under my control in the first place?
Why not learn more about compatibilist arguments then? Your position is what is sometimes referred to as classical incompatibilism - classical because of its long history, going back to antiquity, but especially vigorously debated over the last century or so, when compatibilism rose in prominence.
I am not sufficiently literate, but I can give you my perspective. I believe that according to your expectation, what we would credit for the moral character of our actions is some entity that sits in the control room of your personality, consults your system of values that is manifested partly externally in your brain and takes executive decisions that affect the outcome. My logic is different. We are actually evaluating your convictions, intentions and desires, and we don't care whether they are deterministically related to the surrounding phenomena. They are yours per-se. There is no control room. You are your personality and system of values.
If I couldn't but have had the set of convictions, intentions and desires I have then how can I be fairly held morally responsible, and fairly praised or blamed for having them?
I'm not positing "control rooms" just that there is no good reason to believe that I couldn't but have had the set of conviction, intentions and desires that I do. Instead they were, at least to some degree adequate for me to be thought responsible for having them, freely chosen by me.
They are what we identify you as. You don't really "have them" in that sense. We don't blame you for having them, we are more-so blaming them for having you, or having become part of you.
Lets say that you are decided on a life of crime because of your early life experience. We can explain how your lifestyle choices were determined by your past, yet we evaluate the character/personality/system of values for the decisions that led to the consequent damage. If your personality causes pain and suffering, we blame it, and if it causes comfort and happiness, we praise it. You either have a good personality or you don't. Your character is agent in the world. Its interaction with the environment, the transfer of the values within to actions without, which we consider your freedom, is what we evaluate and judge for better or worse.
Just to clarify. When I say "transfer of the values within to actions without, which we consider your freedom", I don't mean to say that there is some possibility for in-the-last-moment sway on the process of this transfer. That is inessential. It is your character, and you are expected to practice it and manifest it as accurately as you can afford to. You couldn't abstain from living. But as much as we expect you to be yourself, you should expect us to oppose any detriment to us and to judge you for the effects from being you. Freedom is the relation between your personality and the effect it has on its surrounding environment, which is expressed in having involvement in the outcome.
I don't think this is true at all. People are not their values. People do have values, intentions and convictions, and sure they are judged on account of them, or at least on the actions which embody them.
I think that you are objecting, because a person could technically abstain from applying their personality. But that is again due to their convictions, values and intentions. So, the personality can have complex internal dynamics and we don't judge its pieces, but the overall effect.
Yes, but the point is the convictions, values and intentions must be freely chosen or the person is not responsible for holding them.
Why are claiming that the person is not their convictions, values and intentions. Are you suggesting dualism? If you are not, what do you propose is the person?
What I mean is, assuming you are not a dualist, do you suggest that a quantum indeterminacy of some kind, by simply spurring a chance decision here and there in our development, could be more important factor in our guilt or our license to blame a person then the presence of elaborately expressed personality and its relation to the outcome after the development has taken place?
Paul,
Atomic decay is certainly a good example of randomness. And no doubt randomness exists elsewhere. My argument in favor of existence of free will is in line with it. However, I think there are few pieces to this picture.
Let's first consider, what for the sake of this conversation, we can call the big picture - The big picture says that entropy will keep increasing to the point that we will have heat death of universe. This is a deterministic behavior of the system. No matter what we do, how many suns explode into supernovas, it's destined to happen.
However, within the span (scope) of the time where we exist, and within our lives, we act and behave in a manner that is not deterministic but is probable. This localized behavior of our agency is probabilistic in nature and is what we call free will.
Now let's take example of nuclear fusion going on in the sun which basically responsible of pretty much everything we are able to do. There is certainly a deterministic cause and effect relationship between sun rays and us. It provides food for us and sustains life. It also causes skin cancer. Now imagine rays from sun shining on a rock vs shining on a human being. The behavior of the rock and the human being are going to be very different. Rock won't but human being will certainly have a reaction. Within human beings, some humans will actually move to come under the sun to bask under it and other will find shade to avoid it. That's a free will behavior that you don't see in objects like rock who always have same consistent behavior all the times to the rays of the sun.
My point is that this behavior exists within local scope. It further has indeterministic OR cause & effect relationship in its surrounding or areas (spacetime) within which it can yield influence but that influence still is impermanent in grand schema of things (the big picture) - So in my view when we talk about free will, we are restricted to the contextual level where that free will is relevant and not at all levels.
Plants will reorient themselves to align with the sun. However there is also argument that plants have indeterministic processes, through proton tunneling in DNA mutations.
Quoting hume
I think you are more concerned with the consciousness level, than say the free will of a beetle to move around.
I was more concerned with the conditions to make free will possible, which I was arguing is just fundamentally indeterminism. Maybe this is where we misunderstood each other.
I'm not convinced the universe is indeterministic in a physical sense, my mind can't settle on it like it flips on me when I get close to a settled perspective.
I think henceforth, I will remove any notion of the purely physical from my relationship with the universe on any perceived indeterministic level or spiritual level. It has polarized my mid in that I innately seem to want the universe to be deterministic because that makes sense to me, but that throws up issues with free will. The good news is there is probably no way to prove determinism in the universe and I needn't worry so much.
It may be that we have free will only if we want it and what makes us free may be beyond any notion of determinism or indeterminism. If there is a physical aspect to free will, it may even be beyond this universe as we understand it physically.
Sure. Plants are living beings and they have agency and can use that agency to act in free will sort of way. The premise of my argument is that living beings have free will. The notion is applicable only to living beings and not inanimate objects like rock.
One can argue that when we mix sodium with water then there some sort of chemical reaction which is not inanimate. But underneath it's simple the chemical reaction born out of electron bonding and has to do with their charge and energy so yes, you're right in assuming that I'm speaking of free will in terms of presence of "consciousness".
Quoting Paul S
Free will by its very virtue is a phenomenon of a living agent. It's tied to the notion of choice. This element of choice is the one that creates indeterministic outcomes when the agent interacts with his/her environment for survival. I do not think we can speak of free will in case of non-living things. However, we can certainly speak of indeterminism in case of both living and non-living things.
I agree with that. What I was getting at is that despite how complex we assume ourselves to be, if we live in a deterministic universe, it could be argued that our complex behavior is deterministic, it was an inevitable consequence of prior deterministic manifestations. As wonderful as it is, it could be just inevitable.
I tend to agree that for true free will to exist, our intent to do something needs to be indeterministic.
A quote from Psychiatric Times
"The second source arises in the presupplementary motor area, which is stimulated when laboratory animals make the same movements mentioned above, but they do not originate from responses to an external source. The movement instead arises spontaneously; a thought is internally generated through intentional actions. There is an observed rapid rise in electrical signals that build up just before the brain executes these actions. This has led to the notion that the presupplementary motor area harbors some kind of readiness potential, a useful function in generating movement"
It appears that the intent may well be its own system. Maybe it's a key to our to the universe's entropy or maybe we are sufficiently complex to generate our own. I tend to see it as the former, we have a dependency on the universe for our randomness, and that the universe has that randomness.
The research article seems to suggest we commit to an action separately of the action itself, almost like the dice is rolled separate to the action to be undertaken.
Of course I agree that free will has no context for a stone. Although a stone in molten active state could be a conduit to spread the randomness around for the universe so that we can draw on a source of randomness to experience free will. Or if the rain falls in an indeterministic manner on the slope of a stone to add to the overall background randomness of the environment we perceive and draw randomness from.
just missed whole point of how human algorithm works
Yes, life is waveforms of habits (probabilistic behavior), as well as choice/creativity (redirection of actions). This is what everyone does and recognizes. It describes the act of learning any skill, but most especially the arts. However, back in human history, some philosophers and scientists, without any evidence or substantiation, just decided to create a mythology that life is equivalent to billiard balls. One can guess that their motivation was no different from clerics in all history. As outlandish as such a story may be, it actually took root in education, just as similar stories took root in Churches. Such is the nature of the human mind. I doubt even a roach could bear such tales.
It's not just the philosophers. :sad:
History of quantum physics is full of misleading thought-experiment expressions that historians decided to keep on in describing various aspects of QM which ends up confusing laymen - e.g. Einstein's Does moon not exist if we don't look at it? Spooky action at a distance, Schrodinger's cat dead and alive at the same time. Neumann-Wigner interpretation of observer induced reality, so on and so forth.
Yes, the modern form of creating tales and stories for people to sit around and listen to. Darwin was totally wrong. Humans don't evolve. They just change in form.
Sure, there must be quantum indeterminacy for freedom to be actual; if everything were wholly causally determined there would be no freedom in the sense required for the idea of moral accountability to be rationally justified.
I'm not positing any theory that quantum indeterminacy is relevant to our understanding of agential freedom though, because events at that scale are so remote from and inscrutable to us that they can have no relevance for understanding human decision making, other than being thought to allow for the sheer possibility of emergent freedom (which would be impossible in a billiard ball cosmos).
So, I am not a dualist, but I think in terms of emergent agency and freedom, and I think this requires that our decisions are not wholly determined by any antecedent events, whether those events are wholly observable events, or inscrutable neural processes.
Hahaha — some humans even evolve regressively.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mechanics#Comparisons
I simply... disagree. Not for pragmatic or legal moral accountability, not for abstract ethical one. I agree with you that QM non-determinism is necessary for freedom of the physical outcome, as in non-uniqueness of the relation between prior and posterior state in the temporal ordering. This type of freedom in the very definitional sense, is going to depend on non-determinism. But you are asking me to equate my personal accountability and responsibility to a coin toss, i.e. the aforementioned physical freedom. I think that the two are completely unrelated.
Even if physical non-determinism never existed, and life was just a scripted story, I would be agent "in the story". Because that is what characters are, they save damsels, frogs turn to princes, evil stepmothers try to poison their daughters, etc. Their decisions are what they are described to be, ant they are just as important as ever, accountable for who they are as characters. That is the purpose of the story - to make them accountable for their character. What if kids started to ask, why do we blame the evil step mother, when it is us who tells the story. It doesn't matter, because how the character comes to be is unrelated to who they are. The character is in our head, and they are guilty precisely by design in this case, but that doesn't change the fact.
Nonetheless, because I think that we seem to have fundamentally different idea of morality, I will still test you with a thought experiment, if you would oblige me. Imagine that the universe was completely deterministic with exception of one single fair coin. All murderers in the world have killed with complete physical predetermination of their actions, except one that tosses the said coin. Are you telling me that this person, for you, is the only one that can be held accountable for their actions, based on the flip of this single non-deterministic coin?
It seems very important to you to make sure people realize that everything here is just a story.
To a more complete disclosure, I want to make another example. But I hope that you will answer the above question. Lets say there are two puppets governed by the hands of a puppeteer. One puppet beats the other one. Are they morally responsible, if all their mechanical actions are governed externally. I wold say, sort of, but not when seen merely as a puppet, but when considered in their extended self, which is connected with the master. The puppet doesn't have description of their personality on their own. Their agency, scripted as it may be, is embodied in the master. Thus, the master is responsible, yet, it is evil only in character of the aggressive puppet, not the victim puppet.
I am "in character". If there is will of some sort, in the natural law, in any sense of the word, whichever it may be, determinism or not, intelligent or not, I will be still "in character", even if by virtue of that governing overarching will. My responsibility stems from being the very boundary of the features of this character. I understand your idea of morality, because it requires independence of state, and physical non-determinism can afford that. To you, moral delineation without physical delineation makes no sense. But, first, I don't think that there is enough independence in QM to call for moral accountability, considering what we know about character development and how it is very compellingly affected by the conditions early in life of an individual. And it still remains just a physical nuance, about some spatio-temporal relation, which fails to translate into moral tone for me. After all, non-deterministic outcomes can be scripted, but just not scripted by locally acting physical laws that allow prediction. Even if we are together in this play, and are merely aspects of the same big idea for a script, like with the puppeteer case, even if I am ultimately not truly independent from you, because we are moved by the same forces, I am "bad puppet" by virtue of my connection to the will of the master. I am evil in their mind. Someone has to be evil in their story, and there is no excuse for it, or the story will turn into non-sense. If the master decides to throw a dice here and there, or it seems to me that the story is full of unexplained dice-like turns of events, it doesn't change my character. I am still me, or they are me "in character", whichever our case might really be.
Pretty much that is what it is. People musing about possibilities. It's the nature of human existence. Every civilization creates it's own mythology. Determinism is one of our great ones. Determinism applied to life is so absurd, one has to wonder have we regressed from Greek mythology.
Sure. But you're a person, right? It's kind of like you're trying to tell people to believe you because, well, those other people, they're just being people.
...that's too hyperbolic to be true. The development of the sciences suggest that the universe follows a set of natural laws. That suggests determinism at least to the degree that we can say there's more than zero evidence for it.
Quoting MondoR
But that is meaningless. To hold that indeterminism is true because nobody proved determinism true is to hold truth to a double standard. If one should have to prove determinism to justify it, one should have to prove indeterminism to justify it.
The science is not yet decided on the issue. So the rational thing to do, if you appeal to science, is to likewise remain undecided.
Except determinism makes enormous claims, like the idea that this post I am now writing was predetermined since the Big Bang. When you make such a gigantic claim, you got the burden of proof.
Beside, science has decided on this issue. Modern science is undeterministic, on the whole.
And indeterminism makes enormous claims. Like the idea that things can happen for no reason.
What is or isn’t a “gigantic claim” is a matter of personal preference. Burden of proof already assumes that your position is the “default”. There is no such thing.
Nope. Just because events aren't predetermined, doesn't imply that they happen for no reason. They just happen for reasons that are not predetermined.
When an atom decays, there's presumably a reason for it, and yet no individual decay event is predetermined to happen during any specific time period.
Likewise I cannot predict precisely when and how I will die, yet I know that I will, and that it'll be for some reason or another...
Now imagine that the universe is deterministic and, as such, it is determined that at 3pm I will decide to have a cup of tea.
Now imagine instead that it is indeterministic whether I will be alive or dead at 3pm. And thus it is now indeterministic whether I will decide to have a cup of tea at 3pm or be dead at 3pm.
Does the fact it is indeterministic whether I make the decision to have a cup of tea at 3pm magically mean that I am now free in respect of it?
How on earth does that work?
The concept of "predetermined" is a bit broken. On a deterministic pool table, a cue ball hits a 6 ball, that veers off and hits the 8 ball, and that lands in a pocket. Given the state of the table, and that the cue ball started out with its motion, will the 8 ball sink? Of course it will; that's how determinism works. But predeterminism (especially in the sense applied here) seems to say something distinct, and kind of wrong... something akin to the fact that because the 8 ball sinks due to that cue ball, then the 6 ball had nothing to do with it. But of course it has something to do with it.
Quoting Olivier5
Nope; that's just pop-sci myth. Science has not decided on this issue. Schrodinger's equation in quantum mechanics is completely deterministic. Indeterminism comes from application of the Born rule. Interpretations that propose the Born rule ontic tend to suggest indeterminism (and e.g. are susceptible to the measurement problem); but interpretations such as MWI that propose the Born rule emergent are still compatible with determinism. See the link I just posted to this thread. Which is correct? Nobody knows.
It has not yet totally ruled out some invisible unicorn of determinism, hiding behind the empirical data. That may be impossible to do (although Bell tried). But scientists, in their day to day work, use non-determinist models and tools all the time.
The MWI is a ridiculously expensive hypothesis. It assumes the existence of an infinity of worlds, just for the purpose of denying any shred of hazard in the only world we know of. It's pushing risk intolerance a little to far in my view.
The degree to which the MWI is actually usable, practically speaking, in offering greater control is highly debatable. How do you control which universe you end up in? I want to be in the universe where I win the lottery. Can that be arranged by a kind MWI proponent? If it can't, what good is a formally deterministic theory which gives us no additional control? How is it even testable?
I'd rather go where the data lead me: there is only one world that we know of, and undetermined events happens in it.
Come to think of it, aren't hidden variables the last refuge of metaphysics?
That's incorrect; MWI doesn't assume the existence of an infinity of worlds. Refer to Everett's seminal work "The Theory of the Universal Wave Function". Everett notes that the Born Rule (in the introduction, this is "Process 1") is arbitrary and suspect, and lays out an argument for it. Based on this he tosses the rule out, keeping the Schrodinger Equation ("Process 2"). From here the "many worlds" arise; but they arise from "Process 2".
IOW, the many worlds are not assumed, they are concluded.
Quoting Olivier5
Quoting Olivier5
At this point you're not practicing science.
Quoting Olivier5
That question presumes that there's an "authentic" identity, and that the issue is to get the "authentic" one to be in the universe you like. I question that underlying presumption.
Quoting Olivier5
Quoting Olivier5
That sounds a bit backwards... suggesting that we start at our favorite pet theories of free will, then go looking to science to find justification for it.
Quoting Olivier5
But that winds up with two fundamental mechanics in QM instead of one; and one just merely being a result of a guess. Maybe it's a good guess, but it appears unnecessary as well. I would rather actually see evidence one way or the other. You might prefer to include that rule anyway, but don't pretend that's the data leading you... the data is perfectly consistent with both views.
That is true for anything relying on inductive inference, not so much specifically for determinism. Non-determinism and determinism can be both empirical, in that both can specify the possible range of the outcome. There cannot be any science behind inductive inference itself, because science stands on top of it. We have faith in the reproducibility of nature's relations that is not founded on science. Science is founded on it.
Quoting MondoR
That is not precisely true. First, we should come to terms that we cannot talk sensibly (as in by virtue of sense experience) of global determinism vs global non-determinism in a meaningful way, because the two conditions are epistemically indistinguishable. That is, whether the universe tosses dices all the time or is a scripted story is undetectable by observation on a global scale (looking at the entire present and prior spatial configuration of matter). I guess, we could discuss the proposition of global non-determinism metaphysically, but it will be a tenuous conversation with rather uncommitted intuition inspired terminology. And to quote Wittgenstein, although there might be all sorts of invisible forces at play, "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." At least epistemically and scientifically, that I think should be the case. Let's focus on the facts for the moment and leave the nebulous area of metaphysics aside.
What we are actually concerned with is local predictability, and more specifically the constrained sort of predictability that extrapolates the conditions from the vicinity of an object in the recent past to the same location in the near future. Again, even then, whether we actually have a rule for any kind, even probabilistic extrapolation, is unknown. We cannot verify that by definition, because the future contains the events that have no consequences for our moment in time. There is no evidence to be had that our laws will continue to work. The future cannot phone in and tell us whether we are right that nature is going to be always regular. (Even if retrocausation is true in the interpretational sense of QM.)
However, inductive inference is retroactively confirmable. What I mean by that claim is that our expectation for regularity of the natural law in the distant past can be evaluated in terms of the recent past. That still says nothing about the future, but it proves that if the people of the distant past did not think of nature as regular and consistent and did not use their predictive capacity to anticipate the outcome based on precedent anecdotal experience, they would be at a disadvantage. In fact, in the extreme case of complete skepticism to any predictability, they would stall even their routine existence and be extinct. This shows that inductive inference was a good thing for us, retrospectively, and more so explains while we are compelled to trust it. Anyone who didn't trust induction died and left no offspring or culture to reproduce their behavior.
Now, as a philosopher, I cannot tell you that induction and therefore scientific empiricism is right. But being a philosopher is expensive proposition. It is life threatening. Being a pragmatic human being, which is more affordable as a lifestyle choice, I would tell you to trust it and suggest that you will perish if you don't. (In fact, if you didn't trust it at all, I am willing to speculate that we wouldn't be having this conversation.) Yes, I know that I am biased by my culture and genetics, and that philosophically the idea of trusting the future still makes no sense. But I cannot refuse those staples on which my existence thrives anymore then I can refuse to eat. That is, I can, but I dare not think what will commence. This features of faith in induction and statistics are mine to have.
Now, there's something else. In the end, it is through remnants of the past, not direct knowledge of the pas that we understand of our anecdotal experience with nature. You could, I would claim rightfully, in philosophical terms, suspect that those are also taken on faith. You could mistrust even your own memory, written records and artifact history, and doubt whether science was indeed used at all. That immediately implies radical solipsism. Because, if you cant trust anything that has already transpired by the indirect evidence of its occurrence, then you cant trust even your senses. They are also indirect and are not instantaneous. So, philosophically commendable, but self-defeating.
Quoting Olivier5
Lets make some distinction between factual non-determinism and absurdism. What I mean by factual determinism is the experience, or at least the conjecture, that more then one possible outcome can arise from a given circumstance. And by saying possible, I mean it in the positivist sense, as in something that will happen at least once someday. Or we are again dealing with nebulous metaphysical statements in some intuition inspired terminological space. With only epistemologically positive considerations in mind, non-determinism has the burden of proof. So does determinism. There is no point of passing the burden around, because both are empirical statements and can be treated on their own. Both are stating something concrete that is subject to sense experience. Inclined non-determinism is different, because it deals with hidden propensities. It is even more presumptuous statement than determinism, because it relies not only on induction, as a prima facie concept, but on statistical induction as well. Both need to be taken on faith, before propensities/inclinations can even be considered as empirical realities. It still has the burden of proof in those new terms.
Absurdism is not epistemic statement, because it is a counter-epistemic attitude. There is no point of talking about burden of proof for absurdity, because it rejects the notion of effective logic. I do not object to the sentiment philosophically. I am tentatively absurdist myself. I just see no value coming from it in epistemic discussions and therefore would refrain from bringing it up. It is just a conversation ender.
Quoting simeonz
That's indeed the idea.
Quoting simeonz
How do you propose to test the above conjecture that more then one possible outcome can arise from a given circumstance? It's not so easy, because if you demonstrate empirically that two outcomes can arise from the same initial conditions, a determinist can always say that you must not have exhaustively and perfectly replicated the initial conditions.
The universe appears indeterministic to mainstream science and to common sense. But we can't check. We don't have another universe, that we could watch in fast forward to check that everything always happens the same manner as it did the first time around...
So to me, the question is metaphysical. It matters not. It's like invisible unicorns, all-knowing daemons and hidden variables. Maybe the gods know what the future holds, or maybe not... We certainly don't know. We want to know, and it's a good idea to try to know what the future holds. But we also sense confusingly that we will forever be unable to predict the future, if only because any advanced prediction of a certain outcome may change our response to the situation that would give rise to this outcome, and thus change the outcome itself. Predictions of the future affect the future...
Concluded from an assumption, therefore assumed as well. This is nitpicking.
Quoting InPitzotl
And I question the presumption that a new me is born everytime an electron in me changes its orbit. Call me crazy.
Asking if a scientific theory is testable is standard procedure. Whether or not you like the theory, if the MWI is not testable, it falls beyond the realm of empirical science.
Quoting InPitzotl
Of course. It's also consistent with the existence of invisible flying unicorns.
Regularity (habitual actions) should be confused with determinism. Nothing has ever been shown to be precisely deterministic. They tried, and then came Quantum uncertainty.
Philosophers can and should muse using inductive reasoning. I do all the time. Troubles set in when people begin to claim that their musings has a scientific basis as in the case of Determinism.
No, it's accuracy. What you're doing is spinning. The key question here isn't whether we should assume multiple worlds; it's whether we should assume the Born rule. Technically, the multiple worlds are there anyway; they're in the wave function. The photon goes through the left slit and it also goes through the right slit. Think also path integrals and Feynman diagrams.
Quoting Olivier5
It's not craziness, it's just not science.
Quoting Olivier5
This is a false equivalence. We have good evidence that the Schrodinger equation works. We don't even have a model for when Born rule actually applies (i.e., the measurement problem).
Healthy skepticism is justified, but doubt is not an argument. If we start doubting the exhaustiveness of our observations, we are not going to make any progress. A non-determinist could similarly argue that when the the outcome is perfectly predicted, it is only because not all hidden features were measured, and if they were, some of them would turn out different every time. Which turned out to be true in the case of QM. But that didn't change the fact, that in its scope, Newtonian mechanics did make progress for humanity, and pragmatically speaking was correct. I hinted in my (rather longish) reply that we apply determinism and non-determinism with respect to some narrow amount of conditions, not with respect to all there is potentially to know.
Quoting Olivier5
The universe of QM is not just non-deterministic, but probabilistic, which I paraphrased as inclined non-deterministic. This is not the same as arbitrary non-deterministic. Propensities are counter-factual phenomenon, because they are not testable from finite amount of measurements. If you don't accept statistics as prima-facia instrument of reason, they remain untestable, whereas range-based non-determinsm (either/or outcomes) is confirmable by some amount of measurements. At least retroactively/retrospectively as I explained.
Quoting Olivier5
This is what I call absurdism. I consider this different from non-determinism, even when the range of prescribed outcomes of the latter is trivially all-inclusive. A demonstrable statement should be reproducible to some extent, recurring to some extent, and empirical non-determinism should be demonstrable. Whereas absurdism claims that both determinism and non-determinism are deceptive, transient, incidental. As Shakespeare wrote in King Lear - "As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport." Absurdism claims that the universe does not conform to analytical comprehension. A form of contention to reason.
Quoting Olivier5
We consider what the future holds under the hypothesis that we react and that we don't react. If we predict that the future is adverse when we withdraw, we react and thus change it. We evaluate our possible choices - actions and inaction - in accordance to the prediction of their effects. If we predict right, we will change the future precisely as we expect to.
I still want to stress, that induction is not rationally justified. It is pragmatic instrument, that we can infer from retrospective observations is the product of very early natural selection. That still does not verify it.
There is no such thing as natural laws in science. There are very specific equations that attempt to predict approximate outcomes. The term natural laws are used by philosophers as a way of appearance of science. Shrodinger's equations are science. Determinism is a story.
Quantum uncertainty is not arbitrary non-determinism. It just changes deterministic induction with statistical induction, but it is not the same as lack of any predictive utility. Also, everyone who claims non-predictability appears to hang on QM, which appears to me to not be the core of your objection. Are you saying that QM non-determinism is your primary argument against predictability?
Also, things have been shown to have been sufficiently large-scale deterministic to extract value from the predictive behavior. We didn't predict and fail, we predicted and succeeded. That is why we are still here. This is known factual history. We can't claim that this will remain true at the large scale in the future, but the account of our past experience is set in stone and it shows that the world lends itself to prediction. Even if for small-scale phenomenon requires us to adapt from complete determinacy to evaluation of expectations and standard deviations, and risk assessment, we still assume that we will extract value from our predictions, based on anecdotal experience from the past (where it indeed worked.)
No such claim is made. Choices are made for many reasons, but there are choices. I can eat breakfast or skip it.
By this precept, the indeterminist nature of the universe is proven by the double slit experiment.
Quoting simeonz
I agree that it does not NECESSARILY conform to OUR analytical comprehension. That's an assumption that it does. But even if it is a false assumption, it does not mean the universe is ontologically absurd. It just looks that way to us.
I want again to stress that physics does not and cannot claim anything about determinism at the global scale of the entire universe. It only deals with epistemics concerning isolated systems, which are the result of spatial separation and observation of small vicinity of an object in a small amount of time. Therefore, there may be no coin toss involved at all. Maybe it is all scripted, and particle interactions register the various outcomes with frequency that conforms to a probabilistic model, but in reality there is nothing arbitrary. It is not possible to predict the outcome from the available local information. I am not convinced that we need multiple words to explain QM. We only need the mathematics that describes the regularity in the relations between prior and posterior conditions. For all we know, it may all be scripted. Or it might not be.
Predictive utility is not to be confused with exact deterministic precision. The equations get the job done to the required approximate precision. I'm fact, Newtons' are still good enough for most purposes. The outcome and actual precision of each event is undiscoverable. It's just his enough. And from this Determinism built this story about everything that occurs in the Universe can be prodicted with exactitude, even the choices were make. Isn't this outlandish?!
Please, check my next to last response. I don't mean to be impolite, but I don't want to double post it.
"Quantum uncertainty is not arbitrary non-determinism. ...
..."
Quoting Olivier5
Could you elaborate. I understand that ontology is not epistemics, but absurdity is about human logic. What do you mean by the "logic of the deity". Not that I object, but how do you discern it from "chaos of the deity".
Nope. All sorts of funny competing hypotheses are consistent with the facts, including that of invisible flying unicorns. But quite often, one of them competing hypotheses is simpler than the others... and it's often the one that assumes the less.
I agree. However, for better or worse the term Scientific Law is in general use. The overview in the Wikipedia article does a pretty good job of clarifying the situation, but it is easy to mix up "natural law" and "scientific law".
Clarity is required. There are the Schrodinger Equations, the Laws of Thermodynamics, General and Special Relatively, which can be applied for specific predictive purposes. This is different from creating a whole ontology based upon the utility value of these equations.
I agree that this would be outlandish. At least in the sense of local prediction, we know now that this cannot be done. Globally, as I said, non-determinism and determinism are indistinguishable, but locally we cannot make fully accurate predictions at any scale, and the quality of prediction worsens for mircoscopic events.
What I was arguing initially is, that this doesn't make sense for the free will argument, because the neural processes are too macroscopic to be qualitatively determined by this non-determinism. Even if a single synapse could be affected and a neuron would arbitrarily fire every now and then, the human brain is so vastly meshed that I doubt if such occurrences would have sufficient psychological impact to affect our perception of moral accountability. I also argued, that even if those processes were somehow key, I still don't think that morality rests on a coin toss anyhow.
I actually agree with the reply: .
The nature of consciousness and mind is an open question for philosophy as long as no attempt is made to quash it with pseudo-science such as determinism.
I apologize if I translated your suggestion of hidden ontology as theistic inaccurately. In either case, if you could elaborate what you mean, when you have the time, I would be able to respond better. Because I fail to understand what reason means as a more general concept, beyond human comprehension.
How is it different from lack of reason altogether? Because, as it stands, It is difficult to discern something tangible from something intangible, even if it may be just a speculation on our part.
If non-determinism at the scale of the brain function is negligible, this will be pertinent to those views that rest freedom on non-determinism. In the same way in which apparent Newtonian determinism is pertinent to a bridge engineer or a plane manufacturer.
They is no reason to limit anything to there brain any longer. The Gut-brain axis bidirectional communication is accepted by biological science.
I realize that. There is also the extended mind thesis. But I still claim that resting free will on non-determinism via QM implies that the standard deviation to the brain process outcome caused through quantum interactions is significant.
Edit: In other words, I am not sure if that changes our picture in relation to non-determinism.
QM and the Gut-brain axis can be used as new insights. The actual impact of coordinated quantum events is something to explore.
I actually agree. By coordinated quantum events, am I mistaken that you probably mean quantum entanglement? In either case, we can explore them, but making hard statements about their relation with free will is stretching the power of such conjecture. And as I said, I am still unsure that we need it at all. Tossing dices and having will, even if the dices provides a measure of state independence, I think need not be equated.
You may wish to be coherent. You can't say something and then its opposite.
Are you suggesting that some of my previous posts are contradicting?
I didn't think so.
:smile:
Could you be just a tad bit more specific?
Yes, Oliver5, it is a false equivalence.
You're rationalizing it this way, best I can tell:
...but those worlds, again, are already there. They come from that SE part; if you haven't measured exactly where the particle is, there's an amplitude for all possible paths. The Born Rule, as an ontic premise, is positing in addition that there's a process whereby, at some undetermined point, a bunch of those worlds disappear.
Why would there be only one form of reason? Just because we are born with a particular form of reason doesn't mean it is the only one. Our human reason is likely the result of our Darwinian history. Other animal species could conceivably operate under slightly different logics for instance. Even within the human species, the form of reason applied at national, state level is different from individual humans' logic. [I]Raison d'État[/i] is much more shrewd, ambiguous and machiavellian than normal human reason.
Yes, but the point is, while we don't have to limit ourselves to our experience, we still must have some restraint to our concept's meaning to evaluate them in our discussion. If we call anything and everything reason, then I agree that absurdism will be reasonable, because that is precisely the definition of absurdity. But then again, I think we are ending with one useless word in the vocabulary. You must have something else in mind, I suspect, to compel you to propose that reason for absurd reality exists beyond our comprehension. Could you elaborate any of its qualities, even if you can't define it?
You call it absurd, I don't. I'm just saying that human beings are contingent. They could never had appeared, or be different than they are. Therefore their reason, our reason, which has at least some natural, evolutionary basis, could also be different. It's at least possible that it be contingent. Otherwise what? God gave us the Eternal Logos? Or did we get it by eating a forbidden fruit?
Do you think for instance that a race of cogent aliens would follow exactly our logic, and reason exactly the way we do? Or do you think their reason might have blind spots that we don't have, or vice-versa, that they could access realms of reason that we can only dream of?
Sure, one of those worlds may contain a unicorn, but it would have to be shown that it does to meaningfully discuss it; same with the flying. As for the invisibility part, that sounds like an amphiboly. I've never seen my liver either, but I don't think I can call it invisible based on that.
First you said:
You also implied that this should be testable empirically.
Then you said:
Then you implied that the double-slit experiment doesn't prove indeterminism.
I find all this rather conflicting.
You can see your liver with a CT scan. Can you see these other worlds posited by MWI?
MWI doesn't posit that everything you can think of happens. You need to show there actually is a part of the universal wave function with unicorns on it; otherwise you're just fantasizing. It's the same speculative leaps you would have from positing if there's a planet somewhere in the universe with unicorns on it.
What is the point of this discussion? If you're trying to convince me that MWI is incorrect, you're kind of bypassing everything I hold to be relevant. I think the proper criteria for that (along the view you're arguing) is to show that the SE and the BR is ontic; I don't know how to do that, but certainly arguments from absurdity about universes with flying unicorns are irrelevant.
In relation to the human condition, such as morality, the irrationality of our existence lies exactly in the fact that the initial state of the environment are contingent. I agree that our human sensibilities may not be grounded in the natural law, and instead be product of arbitrary initial circumstances. That can most certainly be true and I am inclined to be absurdist in that sense for sure.
But when we consider our analytic faculties, I think that reason arises as consequence from a low-entropy system trying to simulate the external environment in an internal heavily compressed image of the external state and natural laws. And the goal is to anticipate hypothetical outcomes and construct plans that sustain the system. This is oversimplification, because we don't actually simulate our surroundings. Frequently, we just make associations. But there is some approximate probabilisitic homomorphism between the external state and the neurological state. To that extent, some part of being reasonable is arbitrary, as it can never be perfect and it is formed over time, and each organism needs different kind of reason. But the potential for the emergence of approximate probabilistic homomophic representation is what makes the world reasonable. And to me, an absurd world is one where the lack of reproducibility in the local relations between prior and posterior physical conditions and the lack of enough stability, as low-entropy, make such construction impossible long-term. I believe that to be true for this world, ultimately. We are doomed to fail to sustain ourselves. But it is not because of non-determinism, but because there is too much entropy in the world and it increases constantly.
But if you are proposing that the natural law is completely impossible to internalize homomorphically, then this type of analytic absurdism, let's call it that, I propose cannot be reasoned with.
Okay so I can't prove that determinism is not lurking somewhere in this infinite number of invisible universes, and you cannot prove that a unicorn isn't hiding in some of them either. That makes us even...
What I meant is, that as long as indeterminism doesn't include the notion of propensities, it is testable by a finite collection of observations. QM is a different kind of indeterminism, which allows the weighing of different outcomes in accordance to hypothesized propensities. Those propensities are actually called counter-factual outside of the multiple worlds interpretation (where they are, we could say, simultaneously factual, if you will) Such counter-factual properties, such as the wavefunction, cannot be confirmed by any amount of observations, although they can be judged by statistical inference - i.e. interval testing, bayesian inference.
Not saying that, just saying that our human reason may not be fit for this purpose. There could be stuff that forever escape us humans, but they would not escape any conceivable species of course. Others could think better than us.
But if some such representation is possible by any species, then the world is approximately deterministic, at least on the necessary scale. And if that is true, then the neurological processes are governed by deterministic laws (assuming they are not influenced by microscopic interactions sufficiently.)
I should actually make a correction, that my "factual non-determinism" is not verifiable by finite number of observations, but two such hypotheses are distinguishable by finite number of observations. Whereas with QM, two hypotheses may not be ever discernable completely.
Ah okay. I guess I go by the QM type then. Didn't know a form of indeterminism existed that did not function with probabilities.
A lot of assumptions you got there... The reason in question could be purely probabilistic.
It doesn't. At least not in physics. That was just to clarify that QM non-determinism isn't just some arbitrary outcome. It includes underlying properties (it is counterfactually definite), which make it statistically predictive.
Rest assured that I am well aware of this.
It still has to guarantee sufficient utility. Meaning it has to be deterministic enough.
Well, then you understand why I don't consider it the opposite of determinism. It still has predictive utility. And consequently it makes certain processes very reliable, whether they can be completely determined or not. So, I doubt that free will can rest on that. Or that we can claim that the prediction-based model of the world is just a fairy tale.
I agree with that. This is how physics works. At least locally. Globally, as I said, we cannot discuss. (I am not alluding to superluminal effects, but to some property that is feature of the initial conditions of the universe and cannot be measured other then by the outcome of the quantum interactions. This is meaningless to talk about, because it is undetectable.)
So, to the extent of QM being locally non-deterministic at a certain scale, I agree. And there is nothing more that can be said about that, I think.
"That" is indeterminism, a metaphysical view of a universe open to novelty, where opportunities happen, where time is not wholly redundant, where something as radically new as life can emerge from inanimate matter.
It's not about total chaos, it's about letting a little lash between the big wheels of determinism, a little play without which those big wheels won't turn.
I personally don't see much of a connection between the question of free will, which in my view is rather straightforward, and the question of determinism vs. indeterminism, a question which I see as at best aesthetical, and at worse metaphysical.
But don't you think that lack of determinism within spatially and temporally confined setups, as in the double-slit experiment, is not the same as the suggestion that the universe is not pre-determined. It is just evidence, that it not predictable using the locally acting physical laws. I am not claiming that we can even discuss determinism vs non-determinism other then locally, but I am making the point that we cannot call the universe non-deterministic. It is more accurate to call it locally unpredictable.
I agree with that, I think.
If it's locally unpredictable, it is no-deterministic in that sense of the word. It may still be called deterministic in the sense that some predictions can be made at macro scale. Like we can predict that the sun will become a red giant at some point, but not who will win the lottery tomorrow.
I can shake on that. Although that is the physics definition and this is a philosophy forum, so people may have different intended ideas behind the same term.
Quoting Olivier5
I understand. But I meant that, as you yourself remarked earlier, we cannot test whether if we replicate the universe, it would replicate the outcome. Therefore the more metaphysically inclined interpretation of the question is not essential (for physics). We can only talk about our ability to use mathematically expressed locally acting physical relations to predict the outcome. This is, I think, as you said, aesthetically unrelated to the metaphysical debate, which cannot be decided by any scientific discovery.
Or maybe need not be.
Basically, I mean that we cannot talk about non-determinism or determinism at the scale of the universe and its entire history. At least not empirically.
Hey, a little mystery never hurt anyone...
Alright.
I say, we can leave it at that.
Free will implication, heh? I'll settle for tonight.
The person is the subject of all the possible true descriptions and explanations of her or him.
Quoting simeonz
No, I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that while quantum indeterminacy is necessary if there is to be freedom, In the sense that it allows that we always could have done otherwise, our moral choices cannot be determined (rather than merely enabled) by that indeterminism, but must be determined by the purposeful self or consciousness in order to themselves count as free and determining, as opposed to merely random, choices.
Quoting khaled
Where I disagree with you is that you assume there must be one true master explanation, and that people merely disagree about what that explanation is. I don't make that assumption; I think there are a plurality of true explanations that cannot necessarily be unified into one overarching true explanation.
What is proposed by the notion of choices, is that humans have exactly the same behavior as quantum particles. The way humans act is by making choices among a spectrum of possibilities, some being more probable than others, because humans act by habit with the additional possibility of a new creative , innovative, thought/action. Actions of humans can be somewhat predicted, e.g. the approximate time I wake up in the morning, but never precisely predicted. Habit is a very important notion at all levels of life.
Humans and quantum particles pretty much act in similar manner, which is no surprise since everything is quantum. Now, the question arises, what gives rise to spontaneous, non-habitual actions?
Interestingly, there is now new research in hospitals that offer intriguing evidence of conscious thought after a person has biological crossed the threshold of death.
https://nyulangone.org/news/new-studies-explore-end-life-cognitive-thought-improved-cardiopulmonary-resuscitation-methods
Human cells are made of many quantum particles. Neurons and synapses are made of many quantum particles. Admittedly neurotransmitters are not made of as many particles, but to my understanding a few dozen neuroreceptors need to be stimulated simultaneously to cause a neuron to fire. In other words, I doubt that the variance of the event is that significant. We don't accuse other objects at the macro-scale of acting as quantum particles, because the variability in the output of big aggregate systems is very small. Why do that for human beings? This seems rather selective and intentional on our part.
As I said, I am still not sure why tossing dice has anything to do with personal agency. Consider the thought experiment I proposed earlier. All murderers in some hypothetical deterministic world are completely governed in their actions by natural law, save one that has a dice that they use to decide if they should shoot someone. Are they more free? Are they more responsible?
Well said. I think the whole determinism indeterminism debate is a red herring. That’s not actually what people care about when they think of freedom and agency. I don’t think you need the possibility of doing otherwise to be free or morally responsible. All you need is uncertainty of the future, and lack of external impositions.
Exactly right. Det or indet do not play a role in the question about the freedom of will. In general, everything mentioned does not play a role, because the question is wrongly put. From WHAT is the will free? Certainly not from the laws of nature.
Here's what you can do to prove the reality of free will to yourself. This is something which you must prove to yourself, because the idea that someone could prove it to you is counterproductive because that presupposes cause and effect. You can take an object, any object but preferably unbreakable, and hold it above the floor. Decide for yourself, that you will drop it to the floor, yet refrain from dropping it, knowing that you will drop it, but not at any specific time. Wait for a while, then drop it at a time determined only by your mind without any other influence. If you are capable of doing this, then you know that you have free will.
Free will is a feeling, nothing more. It can be predetermined or coincidence. Actions cannot come from free will. Free will is not a force.
I don't do it just for humans. I am suggesting all of life has intelligence, most of the time acting in a coordinated, habitual manner.
"As I said, I am still not sure why tossing dice has anything to do with personal agency."
I don't think it does. It is a misunderstanding of how life perpetuates itself. Life is intelligent, with direction. It is not random.
"hypothetical deterministic world are completely governed in their actions by natural law"
There is no natural law. However, there is intelligent, habitual practice. To understand life, one must observe life, not billiard balls.
1) How did bouncing molecules create such a feeling?
2) How did it become so pervasive?
Without, such accounting, humans should discard the determinist mythology and go with the feeling of choice. Why create a fable just to deny an obvious faculty of being human? To do so, would demonstrate how easily it is to get people to embrace myths as they did during ancient Greece. Have we really evolved or are we just doing the same thing?
Exactly as one experiences it. No need to deny it simply because of a materialist mythology.
Quoting Olivier5
Quoting Janus
So there is this huge, seemingly inreconcilable difference between the experience of hearing a Beethoven symphony and that of seeing an air pressure graph of the same symphony. Two seemingly inreconcilable narratives of the same event. And yet, the funny thing is, it wasn't actually meaningless to interpret music as variations of air pressure. This was in fact the key to recording it and reproducing it mechanically (through vinyl etc.) and thus making music widely available to the people. Our rapport to music will never be the same. 200 years ago, most people would listen to music maybe a few times a year.
Did music become irrelevant once we discovered its physical underpinning? No, it became more relevant. More present. A big industry actually...
Will the human spirit become irrelevant if one day it manages to understand its own neurological basis? Allow me to doubt. On the contrary, they will make a even bigger industry out of it...
That seems doable.
Interesting fact about air pressure facilitating music recording. :cool:
Re the above though: I don't see how a causal explanation of human agency (demonstrating that it is not free from the determinations of the causal nexus) is possible because if what we think of as human agency were determined by anything other than an unconditioned aspect of the self then it would not really be human agency, and the explanation would not be an explanation, but an elimination. In any case how could we ever know that such a purported explanation of the sense of human agency was the true explanation?
Not necessarily. The causal explanation could include the causality of the mental over the neuronal. The relationship between the mind and the body is a two way street, as always. If we discover how the brain creates this 'virtual mental space' that the mind seems to be, we might also discover that the deliberations and decisions made within that mental space are needed, indispensable for the organism, not optional. Not frivolous, not an epiphenomenon, but something useful: the capacity for an animal to consider multiple variables at once, what they mean for the animal's survival chances, and on this basis decide whether to fight or to flee, whether to mate or not with that other animal, where to go to drink, where to go to feed. A piloting system.
Because we could then replicate it, like we replicate Beethoven's fifth. We could make machines that have agency.
Inanimate objects have lost the ability to evolve, except in the smallest manner, e.g. radioactive decay.
Sailing awfully close to dualist lines here.
The Gaia is an interesting idea to explore since the human mind/body is a microcosmic view of the whole.
There is no boundary.
I wouldn't even require uncertainty. For example, theism generally ascribes omnipotence and omniscience to the deity, yet no one claims that they are not free. I know that this example comes out of left field for me, but the point is, that we don't seem to have problem with certainty either.
Yes, but even then, how could we know whether the mind was "causa sui" or itself caused by some other antecedent processes?
Quoting Olivier5
Intuitively, I have little confidence that is possible, or will ever be possible...but I don't have an argument to support that intuition, as strong as it is!
That's because the intelligent answer to that conundrum (from long ago, that is from Augustine) is that God exists in eternity, and so it's not a matter of God knowing what you do before you do it, which would suggest predetermination. God knows all of the past, present and future, so for God there is no before and after.
The duality of matter and form, perhaps, but not that of two different substances.
It ought to be obvious to all, that minds exist for a reason, because life doesn't build things for no reason. It ought to be obvious that everything in this universe is connected to the rest, and therefore that epiphenomena are not logically possible (on top of being not noticeable so nobody would know if they existed).
Unfortunately, some people cannot see these obvious things, like some people cannot see red.
When I try to explain these things to you, I feel like I am trying to explain red to a blind man.
It would make no sense for the brain to generate such a virtual mental space, if that space was not the locus for some vitally important mechanisms.
Quoting Janus
This is difficult for me to process. I realize that you like to be general and broaden the scope, but this makes the discussion a little unconstrained. I am not asking if you are dualist, as if to expose your conviction and mock it, but it is pertinent to the discourse. The next question would be, how does this dualism manifest. Does it cause irregular patterns, such as distribution biases in QM.
Quoting Janus
Unless you are a dualist and you suggest that QM affords the manifestation of will through probability distribution changes from the norm, you appear to suggest that our freedom stems from the conventional possible fluctuations in the chemical processes in our brain due to QM uncertainty. That is, a neurotransmitter binds to a neuroreceptor a microsecond earlier or later and that jags our thought process enough to give it physical autonomy from the externally compelling forces of the world. To me, this is the same as having a coin tossed inside your brain. Yes, we could claim that it is your own private coin, but I think that the killer thought experiment is still pertinent.
Quoting Janus
I meant that the deity is considered free (even if trivially), without it itself having uncertainty. If the deity can be free and certain, why shouldn't people be credited with freedom in the same way. In fact, if someone is a theist, they should consider the freedom of the deity granted to them as part of being. If the deity is free, then the creation is on the whole a choice, then everything in it is the manifestation of a choice, and carries this choice in their embodiment. In any case, you propose that determinism is a matter of perspective, which appears to me to equate non-determinism and lack of knowledge.
If there is a cost to building them. But the whole point of epiphenomena is that they’re costless. And not impactful.
Quoting Olivier5
At best you mean evolutionarily. And even then you’re wrong.
Quoting Olivier5
Where’d you get that epiphenomena aren’t noticeable?
Calling something an experience (or epiphenomena) presumes you noticed it. What does it even mean to have an experience (or epiphenomena) and not notice it?
That's not my question.
I asked: if an epiphenomenon existed out there, how would we know of it? How does one notices an epiphenomenon, if by definition it cannot have any effect on anything?
Yup. Because it is meaningless to speak of epiphenomena that you do know know of. Just as meaningless as experiences that you don’t notice.
How does that follow? Where is the contradiction in noticing something that has no effect?
If some stuff has not effect on anything, it cannot be sensed, because we could not notice any perturbation in the world that we could trace to that stuff. When you see an apple, the apple is having an effect on you. If the apple did not affect light at all, it would be transparent and you could not see it.
Your thoughts aren't apparent to me though. Precisely because they make no physical difference. If they did, I would be able to measure them. Yet, I can conceive of you doing all the actions you're doing right now without them. It's the whole point behind solipsism.
Is the way you detect your thoughts the difference they make? What about thoughts that you do not act on? Ones that seemingly make no difference?
"Hammering a nail whilst distracted caused the pain in my thumb"
"The hammer hitting my soft tissue caused the pain in my thumb"
"Some collection of carbon and iron atoms exerted a pressure on nociception cells which caused the pain in my thumb"
So do you now have three pains because something cannot be sensed without it having an effect. You sensed the event, the object, the physics - three things. But you didn't have three effects.
Indeed, just three narratives of the same effect.
Quoting khaled
And therefore they must have some effect on something, if only our self. To be able to consider a thought, i need to be able to perceive it, to hold it in some sort of short-term memory accessible to my consciousness.
Give me an example of a thought you don't perceive.
You can perceive a thought by definition.
Quoting Olivier5
I would flip that. You don't hold the thought in memory. The holding in memory (and whatever else the brain does) produces the thought.
Quoting Olivier5
Non sequitor.
Yours.
Quoting khaled
There may be unconscious thoughts, if you believe Freud. But the interesting point is that for a thought to be perceivable, you need some mechanism. It doesn't happen by magic I think. Therefore our conscious thoughts must have an effect on something, a percievable echo, a way to get 'heard' by our conscious self. Therefore they cannot be epiphenomena. Otherwise you would have no way of knowing what you think.
I don't have any argument with any of that, in fact I find it intuitively congenial; but I just don't see how it could ever be definitively empirically demonstrated is all.
Quoting Olivier5
So, it would seem, but some things may be simply fortunate accidents. The other possibility is that there is more going on than we can possibly imagine, that our ways of conceiving and imagining evolution, the mind, consciousness and so on are clunky, inadequate and that our inevitable fate is to "see through a glass, darkly", and most particularly when we seek to practice analysis.
Quoting simeonz
You're misunderstanding; I'm not positing dualism.
Quoting simeonz
No, I'm not suggesting that at all. All I have to say about indeterminsim is that it would seem to be necessary to allow for the possibility of freedom. If every single event were predetermined by antecedent events, then we could never have done otherwise than we have done, and freedom would be an illusion. That's all I'm saying.
Quoting simeonz
I don't have any argument with the idea that freedom may be "from eternity" as you suggest. But I don't think it's possible to go very far, analytically speaking, with that thought, which is fine; I don't think it is possible to go very far in thinking about freedom at all, just as is the case with truth. I think freedom and truth and beauty and goodness are not anaylyzable; so the right language to use in speaking about them is the ambiguous language of poetry.
And no, I'm not suggesting that we only appear to be free due to our lack of knowledge, as Spinoza did.
Quoting Olivier5
:up: I agree. The idea that something we are aware of, such as being conscious, could be an epiphenomenon is a contradiction in terms. Our being aware of it means that it cannot be an epiphenonemon, which is defined as a phenomenon having no effect, because it has the effect of making us aware of it.
Among the real neuroscientists, I find Damasio very inspiring.
https://www.ted.com/talks/antonio_damasio_the_quest_to_understand_consciousness/transcript?language=en#t-9208
Quoting Janus
We see ourselves dimly, I agree. It may be that introspection did not provide much of a Darwinian advantage to our ancestors.
Qualia, for example, is not a pure epiphenomenon, but a mixture. You cannot explain the color "yellow" to a color blind person, but you can say that it is a bright color.
Limits to Free Will are facts and any choices we have are between predetermined options. I would fly across the universe to see the other side, but I realize I must have:
1. air
2. water
3. food
4. shelter
5. exercise
6. time
7. love.
Just as a science will only work because of predictability, earth is where I dwell. I try to imagine the other side, but I seem limited by the synthesis of what I already know.
However, there is hope for Free Will. The plain proof of Free Will is the feeling of choices made, and thoughts had, which no one could foresee. This alone does not prove Free Will, but determinism cannot be complete without complete predictability.
Today’s scientific arts are far from perfect predictors, especially when forecasting the roots of thought. Pure Determinism is theory. Compatibilism describes what I actually experience. Many of my thoughts correlate with my desire, and often there is no other information regarding the roots of those thoughts to consider.
The bottom line is that you may have a small amount of free will in a mostly deterministic world.
That is the only sentence to be said on this subject.
The feeling of having wanted something is the only criterion. It does not depend on det or indet.