Compatibilism Misunderstands both Free Will and Causality.
Compatibilism is an example of the old "bait and switch" sales tactic applied to moral philosophy. The bait is that you can have your moral cake (responsibility stemming from free-will) and Humean-Kantian causality (time sequence by rule) too. The switch is that the kind of "free will" that is compatible with time sequence by rule does not support human responsibility.
To be responsible for an act, one must be the origin of that act. If the act is predetermined before we were born, as determinism claims, clearly it does not originate in us or anything we did. So, compatibilism is fraud.
The Compatibilist Notion of Free Will
Further, the idea that "free will" means we can do or choose what we desire (or something similar), reflects a surprising lack of reflection and analysis. If there is free will, it comes into play when we are faced with choices. We have to make choices when we desire two or more mutually incompatible outcomes. Option 1 advances the fulfillment of one set of desires, and option 2, that of another set of desires. So, whatever choice we make will tend to advance some motivational factors at the cost of others. No choice is what we desire simplicitur.
We can't evade this logic by bring in some utility function (money, libido, action potential, etc.) to determine what we most desire. This is because motivational factors incommensurate. We cannot reduce them to a single utility function or measure of value. No amount of cash can equate to being unable to breathe. No amount of free breathing will pay for food and shelter.
Since the 19th century many philosophers have sought to clothe their theories in such mathematical garb, but we simply can't describe the indenumerable and unmeasurable numerically, for any proposed number has no determinate relation to what they seek to describe. So, we can't say that we choose whatever has the highest utility. All we can say is that what we choose, we value most. This value, however, is not mathematical, but conative. Our experience of choosing is not mathematical, but rational. So, no calculation can show a choice to be "most valued," "most desired," before we choose it.
The So-Called Problem
If free will is incompatible with strict determinism, and determinism is a consequence of causality, then surely we cannot be the cause of our acts. Hence, whether of not determinism is true, we cannot be the cause of, and so responsible for, our acts. Thus, there is no free will in a sense that would make us responsible.
This argument is fallacious, resting on an equivocal use of "cause." Clearly, if we are the cause of, and so responsible for, our free acts, we cannot be using "cause" in the Humean-Kantian sense of time-sequence by rule. What other sense is there?
The problem is that most modern philosophers are too lazy to study the history to philosophy. It shows that for over 1800 years, philosophers distinguished two kinds of efficient causality: accidental (Humean-Kantian time sequence by rule) and essential (the actualization of potency).
We all know that if you plant tomato seeds, you are the cause of the tomato plants that subsequently sprout and that there is a rule linking the first event (planting of a certain type of seed) to the second event (the subsequent sprouting of the corresponding plant). This is an example of accidental causality. If you've read Hume, you also know that there is no necessity linking the first event to the second. Since we have two separate events, there is always the possibility that an event may intervene between them to disrupt the expected sequence.
Because accidental causality has no intrinsic necessity, it is a strange basis for arguing that whatever we choose, we choose of necessity, i.e. that we have no free will that would be the basis for moral responsibility.
Those who have done their homework/due diligence know that in his Metaphysics Aristotle distinguished a second kind of causality, which is the kind that makes us responsible for our considered acts. This is essential causality. Aristotle's paradigm case is a builder building a house. Of course, the cause is the builder building, and the effect is the house being built. Aristotle notes that the builder building the house is identically the house being build by the builder. (These are identical because they are merely different ways of describing the same event.)
Since there is only one event, and not two as in time sequence by rule, no event can intervene to disrupt this kind of causality. Since the cause and effect are inseparable (we can't separate building and being built), cause and effect are linked by an intrinsic necessity. While the prior physical state of (a pile of building materials) does not necessitate the form of the finished house, something being built necessitates an act of building.
If we think about Aristotle's example, we see that it is simply an instance of a potential (of the materials to become a house) being actualized by an agent (the builder). So, any actualization of a potency by an agent is an instance of essential causality.
We can now see that free choices are not uncaused choices. They are the actualization of one of several possible courses of action by the moral agent. So, causality and free will are compatible, just not the kind of causality modern philosophers think of.
To be responsible for an act, one must be the origin of that act. If the act is predetermined before we were born, as determinism claims, clearly it does not originate in us or anything we did. So, compatibilism is fraud.
The Compatibilist Notion of Free Will
Further, the idea that "free will" means we can do or choose what we desire (or something similar), reflects a surprising lack of reflection and analysis. If there is free will, it comes into play when we are faced with choices. We have to make choices when we desire two or more mutually incompatible outcomes. Option 1 advances the fulfillment of one set of desires, and option 2, that of another set of desires. So, whatever choice we make will tend to advance some motivational factors at the cost of others. No choice is what we desire simplicitur.
We can't evade this logic by bring in some utility function (money, libido, action potential, etc.) to determine what we most desire. This is because motivational factors incommensurate. We cannot reduce them to a single utility function or measure of value. No amount of cash can equate to being unable to breathe. No amount of free breathing will pay for food and shelter.
Since the 19th century many philosophers have sought to clothe their theories in such mathematical garb, but we simply can't describe the indenumerable and unmeasurable numerically, for any proposed number has no determinate relation to what they seek to describe. So, we can't say that we choose whatever has the highest utility. All we can say is that what we choose, we value most. This value, however, is not mathematical, but conative. Our experience of choosing is not mathematical, but rational. So, no calculation can show a choice to be "most valued," "most desired," before we choose it.
The So-Called Problem
If free will is incompatible with strict determinism, and determinism is a consequence of causality, then surely we cannot be the cause of our acts. Hence, whether of not determinism is true, we cannot be the cause of, and so responsible for, our acts. Thus, there is no free will in a sense that would make us responsible.
This argument is fallacious, resting on an equivocal use of "cause." Clearly, if we are the cause of, and so responsible for, our free acts, we cannot be using "cause" in the Humean-Kantian sense of time-sequence by rule. What other sense is there?
The problem is that most modern philosophers are too lazy to study the history to philosophy. It shows that for over 1800 years, philosophers distinguished two kinds of efficient causality: accidental (Humean-Kantian time sequence by rule) and essential (the actualization of potency).
We all know that if you plant tomato seeds, you are the cause of the tomato plants that subsequently sprout and that there is a rule linking the first event (planting of a certain type of seed) to the second event (the subsequent sprouting of the corresponding plant). This is an example of accidental causality. If you've read Hume, you also know that there is no necessity linking the first event to the second. Since we have two separate events, there is always the possibility that an event may intervene between them to disrupt the expected sequence.
Because accidental causality has no intrinsic necessity, it is a strange basis for arguing that whatever we choose, we choose of necessity, i.e. that we have no free will that would be the basis for moral responsibility.
Those who have done their homework/due diligence know that in his Metaphysics Aristotle distinguished a second kind of causality, which is the kind that makes us responsible for our considered acts. This is essential causality. Aristotle's paradigm case is a builder building a house. Of course, the cause is the builder building, and the effect is the house being built. Aristotle notes that the builder building the house is identically the house being build by the builder. (These are identical because they are merely different ways of describing the same event.)
Since there is only one event, and not two as in time sequence by rule, no event can intervene to disrupt this kind of causality. Since the cause and effect are inseparable (we can't separate building and being built), cause and effect are linked by an intrinsic necessity. While the prior physical state of (a pile of building materials) does not necessitate the form of the finished house, something being built necessitates an act of building.
If we think about Aristotle's example, we see that it is simply an instance of a potential (of the materials to become a house) being actualized by an agent (the builder). So, any actualization of a potency by an agent is an instance of essential causality.
We can now see that free choices are not uncaused choices. They are the actualization of one of several possible courses of action by the moral agent. So, causality and free will are compatible, just not the kind of causality modern philosophers think of.
Comments (282)
So you are a compatibilist... Welcome to the club!
The Kantian sense of causality, which is actually rules sequenced in time, is the empirical sense of it, and does not apply to his moral philosophy:
“...Man considering himself in this way as an intelligence places himself thereby in a different order of things and in a relation to determining grounds of a wholly different kind when on the one hand he thinks of himself as an intelligence endowed with a will, and consequently with causality, and when on the other he perceives himself as a phenomenon in the world of sense (as he really is also), and affirms that his causality is subject to external determination according to laws of nature....”
So, within the last 1800 years, there is a third causality, which is called freedom. Regardless of the validity assigned to it by informed respondents, it is on the philosophical record. By the use of this causality, man is responsible for his practical moral determinations a priori, and thereby responsible for the objective manifestations of them.
Just sayin’.......
If free will is just not being determined, then every electron has free will. Are electrons morally responsible?
No, of course not.
It's something about the particular way that our choices are determined that makes us morally responsible for them or not.
I was speaking of how Hume and Kant contributed to the contemporary use of "cause," not of Kant's moral philosophy.
Also, it is not rules that are sequenced, but events that are sequenced by rules. There is a rule sequencing the kind of seed planted and the kind of plant sprouting.
Quoting Mww
There is not a hint here that he is using "causality" equivocally -- which he is. Rather he leaves the reader with the impression that our moral causality is univocally a causality "subject to external determination." Kant used this confusion to support his thesis that reason is faced with irreconcilable antimonies. It is not. The whole basis of his Critique is a tissue of confusion.
Quoting Mww
There is no reason to think that freedom involves anything other than the actualization of our human potential, and so a species of essential causality.
This is a common confusion with regard to quantum theory. Quantum theory sees all unobserved processes as fully deterministic. It's only when we stick our finger into a quantum system and perturb it in some unknown way that probability is invoked.
Still, I agree that freedom is not indeterminism. It is rather that the acts we, as moral agents determine, are not determined prior to our choices. That is what it is to be a moral agent.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I agree. As I said, to be responsible, we need to be the ones determining our choices.
We must be very careful to note that the kind of "causality" which compatibilists are discussing is not the kind that makes moral agents responsible.
Wavefunctions evolve deterministically, but which classical state of that superposition we become entangled with is random from our perspectives. You only save determinism in quantum theory if you look at the superposition of all timelines of the universe: within any given timeline, inherently unpredictable things happen every time anything interacts with anything else.
Quoting Dfpolis
The particulars of the process by which we end up choosing how to act is what makes us morally responsible agents or not. Whether the outcome of that process is in principle predictable from the prior state of the universe or not is irrelevant.
There are no classical states in quantum superposition, only the sum of eigenfunctions correlative to eigenvalues, and the set of eigenfunctions superimposed is not a physical property, but the result of our choice of a complete mathematical basis.
The equations of quantum theory are fully deterministic. It is only measurements, which involve the system to be measured interacting with a measuring system whose initial state is unknowable, that are probabilistic.
Unpredictable is not indeterminate. Determinism is a consequence of the laws of nature. Predictions require a knowledge not only of the laws of nature, but of the boundary conditions to be applied, aka, the initial state. And, any attempt to determine the initial conditions requires an interaction with a measuring device whose initial state is, again, unknown.
Superpositions, whether coherent or not, do not cause indeterminacy. This is because superpositions are the sum of deterministic wave functions, and so fully deterministic.
Finally, interaction terms in quantum theory are nonlinear and so incompatible with superposition.
So how do we go about actualising a potential? Talk me through the neurological process.
I never said you were a standard one but you are one. I don't believe that determinism makes any sense, so I define myself as a nondeterminist compatibilist. That too is unorthodox.
......and therefore not the “accidental causality” of your “Humean-Kantian time sequence by rule”. Which is all I intended to convey, and by which the equivocation in the quote makes explicit. You know...”on the one hand” as opposed to “on the other hand”?
Anyway....carry on.
:up:
You are assuming, quite irrationally, that Chalmers' Hard Problem is not a chimera, but has a solution. In other words, you have faith that intentional acts are reducible to physical acts. I have previously shown that, for a number of sound reasons, they are not. (https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/4732/intentional-vs-material-reality-and-the-hard-problem). If you find my reasoning there flawed, feel free to explain why you believe so.
You are, however, quite right that for intentional acts to have physical effects they must modify the operation of neurons. How is this possible? In my paper "Mind or Randomness in Evolution" (Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies (2010) XXII, 1/2, pp. 32-66 -- https://www.academia.edu/27797943/Mind_or_Randomness_in_Evolution). I show that the laws of nature (as opposed to our approximate descriptions of them, the laws of physics) are intentional, not material. realities. (The analysis begins on p. 2 of the pdf with the subheading "Logical Propagators.") Again, if you have objections, to my analysis, please post them.
For elements to interact they must act in the same theater of operation. A three kg mass cannot win a logical argument. That is why the argumentum ad baculum is a fallacy. Similarly, a logical proposition cannot, by itself, move a three kg mass. So, for choices to be effective, they have to act in the intentional theater of operations and not by exerting physical forces. However, since the laws of nature are intentional, there is no reason why our committed intentions, our choices, may not modify them.
It is our everyday experience that our commitments have physical effects. We decide to go to the store, and perform the motions required to get us to the store. More irrefutably, we discuss our choices. We could not do this physical act if our choices could have no physical effect -- which is why epiphenomenalism is patently false.
Still, many naturalists are not content with everyday experience, but say they demand controlled experiments. There are so-many experiments showing that intentions can control physical processes that meta-analyses of them calculate Z's of 18.2 (Radin and Ferrari, 1991 -- odds of 1.94 x 10^73 to 1) and 16.1 (Radin and Nelson, 2003 -- odds of 3.92 x 10^57 to 1). A single 12 year experiment (Jahn et al., 2007) produced a Z > 7.
Sill, even though many of these studies conformed to criteria laid down my skeptics in advance, naturalists, like climate change deniers, are unwilling to accept the science. How could they when it contradicts their sacred faith?
So, we have a confluence of theoretical analysis, everyday experience, and controlled experiments that show that human choices have physical effects.
Still, I'm unable to say precisely how intentionally modified laws of nature change the intersynaptic discharge of neurotransmitters. Of course, neuroscientists can't say how each of the 50 or so neurotransmitters does either. So, I can't consider this a serious objection.
Please do not be so hard on naturalists, they have to deal with so much evidence that conflicts with their faith. We need to be understanding.
On the other hand is on the other hand, but it is used to argue that there is an "antimony" involving univocally predicated "causality," and not that there is an equivocal use of "causality." If you think otherwise, quote Kant defining essential causality under any name, or saying that it, and not Hume's two-event causality, is involved in moral agency.
Yes, but I was on a train and bored. Occasionally it's interesting to take a swipe at the apriorist piñata and see what kind of word-confetti sprays out.
I can do both, but how about one at a time:
“....The will is a kind of causality belonging to living beings in so far as they are rational, and freedom would be this property of such causality that it can be efficient, independently of foreign causes determining it; just as physical necessity is the property that the causality of all irrational beings has of being determined to activity by the influence of foreign causes....”
“...Every rational being reckons himself qua intelligence as belonging to the world of understanding, and it is simply as an efficient cause belonging to that world that he calls his causality a will....”
Don’t you see I’m tacitly agreeing with the general principles implied by your OP, only taking exception with your iteration of the “Humean-Kantian” aspect of causality?
I see none of the defining characteristics of Aristotle's essential causality in this quotation. Do you? Kant is only claiming the will causes differently than Humean causality, without explaining how or why. Agreement demands belief, not reasoned assent.
Quoting Mww
The same is true here. Recall the nature of the differences. (1) Accidental causality, Humean-Kantian time sequence by rule, always involves two events, not one as in essental causality. (2) Accidental causality starts a process that may be interrupted by intervening events. Essential causality does not. (3) Essential causality acts concurrently with the actualization of its effect. Accidental causality does not.
Neither quotation notes either of these differences. As presented in these two texts, Kant's argument is merely special pleading: The way we cause in willing is not subject to the determinism of Humean causality.
Likewise :up:
There has to be some underlying reason why those most keen to discuss human will always seem to be those most averse to describing it as it appears to us.
Damn! You couldn't make it one sentence in without regurgitating the patented creationist misrepresentation of evolution?
Yeah no.
My bad, I thought it was a proper journal, but:
it's a religious propaganda thing. Obviously you're going to regurgitate creationist misrepresentations of evolution!!! :facepalm:
Obviously you are continuing to criticize what you have not read. The paper affirms all the science in the contemporary evolutionary synthesis. If you want to criticize me, at least find out what I am saying first. As it is you come off as a Jr. Trump.
Yeah, the analysis in that 1991 paper is an absolute gem.
Did you attend Trump University, or are your prejudices home-grown?
Did you not read my refutation of the whole thing recently published in the Journal of Middle-Earth Studies?
I am open to the possibility that I may have been misled in my research, but not by one-liners. If you have a concrete criticism, spell it out.
It is amazing how the conversation ceases to be rational when I challenge cherished beliefs. If you think I am in error, make a case -- otherwise you come off as a bigot.
Ya, bullshit. One sentence in and it was already creationist anti-scientific rubbish. I did read on for a while, hence my follow-up. It did not get better.
Quoting Dfpolis
:fire: Dang, feel that savage burn!
It's not prejudice, btw. I didn't know about that pretend journal so had no clue going in how intellectually bankrupt your paper was going to be. I actually was ready to be impressed. To completely reverse that expectation in a single sentence is, I suppose, kind of impressive in a way, albeit for all the wrong reasons. You and your imaginary friend may go in peace, until you make it your mission to misrepresent science and facts.
Quoting Isaac
:rofl: I'm sorry, I did not. I know it's an impressive, popular, and respectable journal but the articles are way too long.
On this issue yes. I believe in evolution though. That's in fact precisely why I believe in what they call 'free will'.
Thankfully, as far as my commenting at all herein is concerned, Hume now stands alone. Which makes the statement correct. Which ends my involvement.
I accept the modern evolutionary synthesis as sound science. What have I said that would make you think otherwise?
I would like to read the reasoning that leads you from evolution to free will. The fact that you put "free will" in scare quotes makes me wonder what you mean by it.
I am not sure what you mean, but fine.
The path from evolution to free will goes through cephalization, one of few long term tendencies in evolution. Cephalization is literally "the formation of the head". You will note that most animals have some sort of head. But not all. The species that appeared the earliest exhibit no head. Eg jelly fish. But flat worms and annelides (earth worms) have a sort of proto-head, where about 20% of the nervous system is concentrated, together with a mouth and primitive eyes.
This tendency to concentrate neurons and senses in the front of the animal goes on, eon after eon, because it provides a darwinian advantage, when you can move, to be able to look in the direction toward which you're moving. And concentrating neural power must makes some sense as well.
And at the end of this evolution, there's some 'pilot in the plane' that gets generated, some navigating system for the animal, that allows full integration of sense data, memory, analysis, etc, within the same space to make for better piloting.
And there you have it: a worthy, if oft-forgotten, nutshell.
Bumblebee
A bumblebee (or bumble bee, bumble-bee, or humble-bee) is any of over 250 species in the genus Bombus, part of Apidae [...] Most bumblebees are social insects that form colonies with a single queen. The colonies are smaller than those of honey bees, growing to as few as 50 individuals in a nest.
Free will
Free will is the ability to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded.
Free will is closely linked to the concepts of moral responsibility, praise, guilt, sin, and other judgements which apply only to actions that are freely chosen. [...] Traditionally, only actions that are freely willed are seen as deserving credit or blame. Whether free will exists, what it is and the implications of whether it exists or not are some of the longest running debates of philosophy and religion.
(from wiki)
So we need free will in order to feel comfortable in administering punishment.
But the purpose of punishment is to change behaviour.
There are other ways to change behaviour.
Hence, we do not need to appeal to free will.
I pointed out that the very first sentence of your paper is factually wrong. That I did do is another fact that I suppose your faith obliges you to disregard.
That is my preferred term.
Quoting Olivier5
While I agree with the evolutionary advantages of cephalization for ambulatory organisms, there is no reason to think that the evolutionary advantages lead to anything but superior data processing and response to the environment -- no reason to think that it leads to subjective awareness, and no reason to think it leads to free will/choice.
Definitions:
Free will:
Quoting Dfpolis
While this is not a definition, it implies the kind of free will I am defending, i.e. one that sees acts as having their causal origin in the moral agent. So, "free will" means that at least some of our moral choices are not predetermined, but originate in an informed act of the moral agent.
Quoting Dfpolis
Causality:
Quoting Dfpolis
I then go on to discuss each type at length providing examples.
Quoting tim wood
That is why the OP is not short.
Quoting tim wood
There is no evidence that bees have the kind of free will that makes them responsible.
I did not offer evidence that humans do, because whether we actually have free will in the sense I am using is irrelevant to the point under discussion.
My thesis:
Quoting Dfpolis
Still, it is clear that we have the kind of free will that makes us responsible, that makes us the origin of lines of action not fully predetermined. To have free will in the required sense is to be capable of actualizing one of a number of incompatible choices equally in our power. Clearly, it is equally in my power to go to the store or to stay home, and my choice actualizes one of these possibilities.
Not at all. Despite free will, we should feel very uncomfortable in administering punishment.
1. The act we might punish might not be a free act. For example, we can't get into other people's minds to know whether they acted freely or as the result of some pathology.
2. Why do we have the moral right to administer punishment?
3. Is committing an evil act a moral warrant for punishment?
4. Even if we are justified in administering it, what is proportional punishment?
I could go on.
Quoting Banno
Agreed. Whether free will is possible, and whether it is real, have nothing to do with punishment. We might justify negative reinforcement without assuming free will, and we might accept free will without thinking that it justifies the administration of punishment.
I suggest you read the works of naturalists such as Huxley and Dawkins, who explicitly argue that we do not need mind in nature as evolution exemplifies order emerging from randomness.
IDK, I'm missing the social dimension and the sense of individual decision making. Bumblebees don't punish or reward others. The rules they follow seem genetically coded rather than socially decided. The queen is the queen forever. Insects also seem to lack the flee or fight mechanism, a fundamental decision making mechanism among vertebrates. I'm not convinced bumblebees are free. Theirs seems a very static system in which degrees of freedom are miniscule.
So what you are saying right now is not really what you are saying? Who is talking when you talk?
Me saying this at random makes it much less my choice to say it than if I said it for some reason. That's why indeterminism is a much bigger threat to freedom than determinism.
I'd like to know whom I am talking too.
I am made of neurons, molecules, atoms, and particles.
They, and so I who am made of them, are shaped in part by society and culture, including our ancestors.
Where is the university? All you've shown me are buildings and grounds and students and faculty and books and equipment. Where in all of that is the university you promised to show me?
A 'superior data processing and response' system must include self-reference. A predator for instance needs to know where he himself is compared to his pray, what's their relative speed, etc. This requires a mental 3D map, the modelisation of movements within that 3D map, and therefore I think some sense of self vs the rest of the world.
Note that some animals are commonly thought to have a strong sense of self-preservation. They fight, they flee, they hide. Self preservation requires a sense of self.
Nice to meet you, girls!
I think I said in the OP that essential and accidental are two types of efficient causality.
Quoting tim wood
The difference Aristotle is illustrating is that while accidental causality links successive events, essential causality occurs in a single event. It is an agent actualizing some potential here and now. Not every instance of essential causality is a willed choice, but every willed choice is an instance of essential causality. So, the building example illustrates the general concept of essential causality, not willing in particular.
Quoting tim wood
Yes, but building willingly and willing to build ate inseparable
Quoting tim wood
It kicks in as soon as one commits to a line of action and continues as long as one continues to be committed. What commits is a unified person. We abstract out of that unity the capacity to commit and call it "the will," but the will is not a thing, it is only a person's capacity to make commitments. So, we should not reify the will.
Quoting tim wood
It means that we can make rational commitments. It is not an artifact of legislation, but legislation can reflect the fact that persons can and do act as moral agents.
Quoting tim wood
Matt 5:28: "But I say unto you, that whosoever looks on a woman to lust after her has committed adultery with her already in his heart."
Note that the text envisions actually looking as a means to the end of lusting. It does not condemn looking, or feeling, but acting to an immoral end. We know that we are committed to an end when we are executing the means to that end. (Walking the walk, not merely talking the talk.) This is not thinking of the act only, but starting to act on the thought.
Quoting tim wood
No, I can assign a meaning to an act without committing to the act. I can think
Quoting tim wood
One can commit in the framework of a universalist ethics, or in that of a relativistic ethics, so relativism is irrelevant to the fact of moral agency.
I suggest you read them, esp. Dawkins who takes great pains to explain that evolution is not, nor could be, a random process, you charlatan.
This went right over his head, I am afraid.
It is evidently a random process.
It is assuredly not.
Unpredictable and random aren't synonyms. Nor is the generation of genetic noise as important as what is done with it, which is algorithmic, not random.
It is important, but it is not the only source of characteristics variation. Nor is it especially profound. All it means is that billions of complex copying events over millions of years haven't been 100% accurate. That's the bare minimum for noise generation, and we can take that as a given. Heredition and survival advantage are what powers evolution, i.e. they are what take the current ecological solution and drive it towards a more optimised solution.
Anyone who has experience with time-dependent optimisation algorithms -- the core of my PhD, postdoctoral work and my first post-academic position -- knows that noise is important to practically solving numerical optimisation problems, but no one would describe it as the thing "powering" that optimisation. And natural selection is nothing more than a very long optimisation algorithm.
In addition, the nature of the noise generation is far less important than the fact that some means or locally exploring state space exists at all.
Indeed, we can take a great deal of randomness for granted. And without it, evolution would not work. I rest my case.
I think that was closer to my case. No one is denying that noise generation is important to solving optimisation problems. The contention isn't even whether evolution can be described as a random process, which it is not, irrespective of the importance of unpredictable (not random) noise generation.
The point here is that Dawkins & co go to great pains in many books to strenuously explain that evolution is not a random process, and yet charlatans like the OP will, with gay abandon (read: religious zeal), cite these very same people as claiming the opposite. That is my beef. By all means disagree with evolution. By all means fail to understand it. Just don't lie about it.
Evolution is not just a question of adapting to an environment. It's about adapting to and competing in a constantly changing environment. The environment changes for a number of reasons, including of course the effect of life and evolution themselves on it. So your noise generation is random, and the algorithm with which you process it is randomly changing at all times.
Yes, the 'cost function' that evolution minimises is time-dependent and a function of the very genetic population it optimised. That is still an optimisation problem.
Quoting Olivier5
You're still using random as a synonym for unpredictable. And it is still irrelevant to my point.
No no. Random as in quantic randomness that leads to random mutations that lead to random changes in the environment... Random random.
This was the "nonsense" that earlier you told me to educate myself on evolution with. Now it's evident that Dawkins has repeatedly said the exact opposite of what you claimed, you're just going to dump him as a usable citation? Ha! Point still stands. You could not get one sentence into a paper without completely misrepresenting science.
Data processing contains no reference whatsoever. It is simply the physical manipulation of input signals to produce output signals. Evolution selects for systems that produce more adaptive outputs (actions give an advantage in the survival of offspring).
It is we, as thinking beings, who give input and output signals reference -- who see them as meaning something. There is no warrant for imbuing data processing systems, whether organic or artificial with such human attributes. To do so is anthropomorphizing them.
You can see that reference plays no role in signal processing, because whatever the signal means, it will be processed in the same way. Say a signal has a wave form. It will be processed in exactly the same way regardless of whether we see that form as referring to a water, light, sound or seismic wave.
Quoting Olivier5
You are confusing having data or manipulable representations with knowing data or representations. A physical data processing system will produce the same outputs whether we assume that it is aware of the data it processes or not. So, the assumed awareness can have no physical effect. If it has no physical effect, there is no way for natural selection to prefer it.
Quoting Olivier5
No, it does not. It only requires adaptive physical behavior. We may identify them and project our human experience, our sense of self, into them, but there is no evidence requiring us to do so.
I have read Dawkins, and I stand by my claim. I said neither that evolution is entirely random, nor that Dawkins claimed that it was. If you read my paper, you would know that. As you refuse to open your mind and consider any evidence or arguments that might shake your prejudices, there is no point in spending more of my time responding to you.
I read the part of your paper that claimed that philosophical naturalists characterise evolution as a purely random process, which is a lie. And I read your response to me that claimed that Dawkins' books back up this lie, which is also a lie. So what I know for sure is that you're a charlatan. When the same charlatan explains to me that my view would change if only I read more of his charlatanry, I will take that with a pinch of salt. I don't treat backward works of fiction as sources of truth. I do get that, thanks to the brainwashing you were victim to as a child, you are obliged to though, and to that extent you have my sympathies. But you're still a charlatan.
Data means something. It's provided by the senses, and it therefore refers to the world out there, or rather to our perception of it.
Quoting Dfpolis
Logically, it does... To protect something, one needs to be aware of that something.
Data means something to humans, not in its physical representations. Data in a computer is simply a physical state, typically accumulations of electrons or sets of magnetic orientations. Data in neural systems is also a physical state, typically neuron firing rates and dendritic connections. No purely physical state has intrinsic reference. It is simply what it is, without being "about" anything else.
Quoting Olivier5
No, to intend to protect, one needs to be aware of it. Mere protection requires no awareness. Overlaying rocks protect underlying rocks without a hint of intent or awareness.
Yes, you wrote a lie. You can quote nothing in my paper saying that. Please do not lie about my work again.
(emphasis added)
Survival has it's own sources of randomness, like genetic drift.
Mating is generally viewed as random by default, and population genetics therefore draw on probabilities. Eg gametes released in the ocean and meeting one another, or a butterfly meeting another butterfly, or some polen spore blown by the wind to one pistil among many... Hard for me to think of those things as anything else than random events. When a species is rare / endangered, a few generations of unfortunate matings can lead to the species demise by genetic drift into extinction. A species can survive longer when mating is random over large numbers because the probabilities of rapid genetic drift from one generation to the next are lower then.
Yeah but somebody keyed it in, or connected to the computer a camera or another sensor, itself designed by some folk at pointed somewhere by another. Data means "given" and it's [i]given[/I] by something or somebody. There's always a source to the data and it is always collected for a reason or another.
Quoting Dfpolis
Rocks are not been chased by predators. It's easier for them.
Astonishing! You can't even cite your own paper honestly.
The very first sentence!!!
Yes, data is the given, but it is not a cognitive given for the computer, but for to us. As you note, someone, some human, has keyed it in or arranged some other input. It is to that person that the physical state of the computer has meaning and reference.
We can explain every operation of a computer without the slightest appeal to the meaning of the data it is operating upon. Thus, meaning is irrelevant to computers.
It may be that some other species has consciousness, perhaps porpoises. If so, it is not because they can process data, but because they are aware of some of the data they process.
As I have argued in an earlier thread, it is impossible to reduce intentional operations such as knowing and willing, to physical operations. And, because evolution is a theory about the physical world, it does not have the power, by itself, to explain the emergence of knowing and willing as opposed to processing sensory inputs to produce adaptive responses.
Quoting Olivier5
Yes, but even amoebas respond to their environment.
Superior animals look purposefully for data, in an active manner, they don't collect them passively. They are looking. This indicates an awareness of the world out there and of their presence in it.
All data has a source and a cost (beyond the most basic and passive systems) and therefore it has a darwinian advantage, or it wouldn't be collected and analysed in the first place. It wouldn't exist if it wasn't useful. There's no data without some import or another, and therefore there's no data without some possibility of a referent. Data is always about something, or it won't get collected by a living organism at all.
What you are saying is that the mental system of a porpoise or donkeys may not include this mirror effect we call consciousness. That means they may be aware of something (as proven by their displaying behavioral signs of knowing of a nearby predator for instance, or showing interest for a potential mate) but not aware that they are aware.
I conclude tentatively that superior animals could well be self-aware but not self-self-aware. Their awareness is (perhaps) not reflective.
I'm making that up as I speak of course. Still chewing on it.
1. That does not say what you claimed I said, i.e. that evolution is purely random.
When you take one sentence out of context, you can twist its meaning. That is why you need to read articles instead of twisting the first line of an abstract.
2. "Random" has many meanings, one of which is mindless. It should be evident to anyone who read the title ("Mind or Randomness in Evolution") that the meaning of "purely random" in the abstract is totally mindless. That evolution is mindless is the argument that naturalists use against William Paley's watchmaker argument.
Surely, you are not saying that Dawkins supports Mind in nature?
3. Had you read the article, as a fair-mined person would have before criticizing it, you would have read:
"Evolution rests on three points. (1) The existence of variant genotypes. These result from “random” mutations and transcription errors; (2) A selection mechanism favoring variations enhancing reproduction and survival; and (3) Inheritability – the capacity to pass on variations that lead to enhanced survival and reproduction."
This is not saying that evolution is purely random as you claim I did. Only the first point involves randomness. In fact, the article spends pages on the role of deterministic laws of nature in evolution.
4. I explicitly quote Dawkins discussing the non-random aspect of evolution:
"In nature, the usual selecting agent is direct, stark and simple. It is the grim reaper. Of course, the reasons for survival are anything but simple – that is why natural selection can build up animals and plants of such formidable complexity. But there is something very crude and simple about death itself. And nonrandom death is all it takes to select phenotypes, and hence the genes that they contain, in nature (Dawkins 1996a: 87)."
So, once again, you have shown your willingness to criticize what you have not taken the trouble to understand.
This does not argue intentionality. Looking for predators, food and water is adaptive behavior selected by evolution. It is not evidence of a rational decision-making process.
Quoting Olivier5
This is true of practical knowledge, but not of wanting to know for the sake of knowing, i.e. theoretical knowledge.
Quoting Olivier5
We humans see that neural states as representational, but that does not mean that they need to be recognized as representational by the organism they belong to, to generate adaptive behavior.
Quoting Olivier5
Awareness is what I am discussing, and awareness is not mirroring, but knowing. Awareness does not reflect anything back. We are aware when what was merely intelligible is actually known. Actualizing the knowability of neurally encoded data gives those contents something new, a relation to a knowing subject. This is a relation no amount of physical processing can achieve because the subject is not part of, or even latent in, the representation.
Quoting Olivier5
I appreciate your time and considered reflections.
That isn't out of context. That's your opening untruth.
Quoting Dfpolis
Random does not mean, nor has ever meant, mindless. That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
Quoting Dfpolis
And yet you did claim this, in the first sentence.if you're trying to convince me that you are logically incoherent, no need. It's evident from your posts.
Quoting Dfpolis
Odd, then, to cite him here as evidence that naturalists believe evolution to be purely random. Again, no shock that your magnum opus is as schizoid as your posts.
Aristotle would, I think, say that you were the efficient cause (having actualized the relevant potentials) and that the dynamite was an instrumental cause, as it was the instrument you used to effect your will to blow the stump up.
Quoting tim wood
If we narrow our focus by abstracting the part from the whole, fixing on this to the neglect of that, the result is not to change the reality, but to limit our understanding of reality. This is a bad habit easily corrected by taking the time to see the abstract in context -- thus avoiding Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness (which consists in seeing our abstractions as the concrete reality).
Quoting tim wood
?. Didn't you just say we have gerunds and participles with which to translate it? We understand that building is in the active mood of the present progressive tense and being built in its passive mood. more importantly we know that building and being built are always inseparable, being two sides of the same coin -- and that is Aristotle's point: that there is no happening without a doing, and so any actualization of a potential requires the act of an operational agent.
Quoting tim wood
He was never interested in abstract grammar, but did linguistic analysis to tease out the ontology it expresses. You can see this in the Categories, the point of which was to clarify the confusions Platonism traded upon. So, he was doing more than making a grammatical point. He was asking us to look at the grammar and see the reality that motivates it, viz. that there is no acting without something being acted upon, and no being acted upon without something acting.
Quoting tim wood
I believe you think too little of Greek comprehension. Yes, there is a process of building, but it is not interminable. There comes a moment when the process is complete, when it has reached its telos, and the house is finished.
In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle shares his vision of the process leading to a choice, which he calls proairesis. It is rational, starting with the end we desire, determining means adequate to that end, then what is required to effect those means, and so on iteratively until we come to what must be done now. Aquinas adds that we only know that we are committed to the end when we will the means -- in other words, when we begin to walk the walk.
Bye, crazy lying Christian dude.
Ah. Cheers, @Kenosha Kid.
@Dfpolis' writing style reeks of fundamentalist Christianity, but I didn't see the explicit evidence until here. He needs free will in order to keep his god. The "arguments" here are not presented for critique in good faith, but to bulldoze a Christian perspective.
The scientific concept(s) of "degrees of freedom" is interesting here as it suggests that freedom is something that can be quantified. And thus that freedom could have started very small among bees and other species similarly "simple" and then grow up progressively.
The mechanical meaning of "degree of freedom" also suggests (to me anyway) the idea that a little bit of "play" is necessary for anything to move. This is an esoteric idea perhaps but a guy interested in mechanics should be able to relate. In mechanics, "play", also called "backlash" or "lash", is the gap between the parts of a machine. Without it the machine will grip (it won't play, it will have no degree of freedom), but if there's too much play, the machine will lose in efficiency.
I see randomness as the universe's "play", the little gap between the wheels of determinism, that allows the whole thing to get some degree of freedom and move ahead, instead of gripping.
Were I a fundamentalist, I would not accept evolution as sound science.
I think what you find unusual in my style is the open, rational consideration of evidence from anyone interested in truth. I read people I disagree with to understand why they think as they do -- and discuss philosophy with any person willing to engage in rational and civil discourse.
Your style is not unusual at all - there have been a half-dozen similar in the last year alone.
Quoting Dfpolis
...from any true Scotsman.
I don't think he was saying his style is unusual, but that you find something unusual in it
And a scotsman by any other name...nah mean?
-Antony Flew.
Not quite. I want to know what is. I see processes, and processes coming to completion. Plants sprout, grow, disseminate seed and die. People are conceived, born, mature, do good and/or evil, and die. Processes and ends are equally real.
Quoting tim wood
I have no idea what this means or how it relates to what I said. What is the "it" I want? What is the "something that it cannot be the essential cause of"?
Quoting tim wood
I do not. I wish to say that humans are moral agents because our commitments are the radical origin of new lines of action that can do good or evil. By "radical origin," I mean that the new lines of action are not fully determined before we commit to them.
Quoting tim wood
Let me be clear, accidental and essential causality are distinct, but not mutually exclusive. Processes always involve the actualization of potency over time. The pile of building materials does not suddenly and discontinuously become a house. Rather a building process turns it, bit by bit, into a house. At every instant the house is being built, there is an essential cause in operation (the builder building). If the essential cause ceases to operate, the house ceases being built. When the house is again being built, its essential cause is again operative -- some builder is once again building.
What we learn from this is that accidental causality, the linking of an initial event (say the signing of a construction contract) to its subsequent outcome (the completion of the house), is simply the integral effect of essential causality over time. At each instant that the process is progressing, it is doing so because an agent is concurrently actualizing some potential.
Imagine I decide to go to the store. If at any subsequent time my intention changes, I will no longer be going to the store. I might still be driving in the same direction, but I will not longer be driving to the store, but to a point where I can implement my new intention.
Quoting tim wood
Again, not quite. What the term "cause" refers to is what someone says it refers to when they use it. Still, what is (the actual process of building, deciding or whatever) is what it is independently of what anyone says it is.
Quoting tim wood
It is not consistent if you abstract away the continuity of processes. While you may think of moments of essential causality as discrete and isolated points of action, in reality they are neither discrete nor isolated. Rather, each moment of action is dynamically linked to its predecessor and successor.
If we reflect, it is clear that no change can occur in a single point of time, and so no process can progress in an instant. Rather, if we are to capture the notion of change, and of progression of a process, we must think in terms of finite intervals, however infinitesimal. Still, there can be an instant of completion.
Quoting tim wood
No, the builder building (an agent in operation -- not an abstract operation) is the essential cause, not of an abstract operation (building), but of the building being built (a concrete reality).
Quoting tim wood
We agree.
Quoting tim wood
As I pointed out above, accidental causality is derivative on essential causality, being its integral effect over time. At each point in the process that links the initial to the final event, there is an agent operating to actualize some potential -- taking the process to the next stage.
I am actually Scottish by blood, so...
I could write about randomness and indeterminism, but you'd be the only reading.
The Open Universe by Karl Popper, is a a series of arguments in favor of an indeterminist outlook in (of course) quantum mechanics but also in classical physics. It's a serious, thick, argumentative and as always crystal clear book that pretty much disposes of determinism. Highly recommended to the dogmatic medieval thinkers here (but you could read it too).
French biologists Monod and Jacob wrote about randomness in evolution, e.g. in "Hasard et Nécessité" by Monod or "Le Jeu des Possibles" by Francois Jacob (not sure what the English titles are) in the 1960/70s.
Closer to us (and to you culturally), Stephen Gould writes well about how evolution is stochastic by nature.
Does it, to any greater extent than the mainstream interpretations of QM did at the time? Popper wrote prior to the widespread acceptance of deterministic interpretations of QM. He also did not understand QM well, believing that quantum events were completely unpredictable, despite the Born interpretation of the wavefunction entering QM at the level of postulate by that point.
Popper's other argument was that scientific experiment always dealt with simple phenomena, i.e. theory simplifies reality and yields predictions from them, since complex phenomena are beyond our technological capabilities. Popper of all people will have known that this is not a good scientific theory, since determinism is falsifiable while his indeterminism-of-the-gaps is non-falsifiable. Indeed, he states this as a metaphysical argument and it can be dismissed as such.
This should not be confused with non-determinism in QM. You seem to lump together:
- phenomena that, given all relevant information and the technological capability to process it, yield statistical outcomes independent of the phenomena under study (randomness):
- phenomena that, given all relevant information and the technological capability to process it, would yield statistically predictable outcomes (QM, stochastics);
- phenomena that, given all relevant information, we could not make anything more than statistical predictions (complexity);
- phenomena that we cannot have all relevant information about (statistical mechanics).
Quoting Kenosha Kid
There is no such thing. QM are generally interpreted as indeterministic.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
How would you go about falsifying determinism, then? Please propose an experiment that could prove it false.
This is your problem. You are not precise with language. Quantum indeterminacy relates to knowability: we cannot, for instance, know both the position and momentum of a particle to arbitrary precision. This underpins the wavefunction description of particles.
Whether the behaviour of that wavefunction is deterministic or not is the subject of the measurement problem. If the wavefunction evolves deterministically following or during measurement, QM is a deterministic theory. This is the case in MWI, for instance. If it undergoes some collapse mechanism (Copenhagen) or other probabilistic means of producing singular measurement outcomes (e.g. transactional QM), it is non-deterministic, specifically it is probabilistic.
They are not the same thing, nor are they purely random, nor are they the same thing as stochastical indeterminacy, nor are they the same thing as complexity.
Do you understand what falsifiability is? That nature is deterministic can be falsified by the discovery of a phenomenon which is knowable, tractable, but at any scale unpredictable.
Well then, we agree.
But you said it yourself: unpredictable is different from undetermined. Something could be fully determined but unpredictable. For example the three bodies problem in classic physics is I think deterministic in the sense that it can be proven (I think) that there is only one solution to the equation. However we cannot compute the solution, we don't know how to do it, and therefore the behavior of three bodies interacting through Newtonian gravity cannot be successfully predicted with the tools at our disposal. It doesn't mean it's not deterministic.
This is an example of something being deterministic, knowable, but intractable.
You cannot falsify full determinism. It would require two universes, absolutely equal at time t, and then the ability to compare them at time t+x. We don't have two universes absolutely identical at time t. Ergo determinism is essentially a metaphysical position, and always will be. It brings no scientific value, it can make no significant difference to anything. We are talking about the sex of angels here.
That is why there are three parts to the falsifiability criteria: knowability, tractability, unpredictability. Unpredictability alone does not cut it.
That sounds like a cherished belief. It has no value in science.
For me, it can easily be disposed of as an non-necessary hypothesis. We don't know for a fact, and will never know, if everything in the universe is predetermined or not. It shouldn't bother people, therefore.
If one thinks for instance that free will is incompatible with determinism (which is how this discussion started), well that's no big deal because determinism is pure metaphysics. You can easily dispose of it and retain your sense of free will.
This seems to indicate that "determinism/indeterminism" isn't actually a property of the universe at all, but something else. When we think about "the universe", we presuppose determinism, because the "universe" we think of is actually a model of the universe, and a model relies on determinism to function.
That's a good point. We seem to project our need for predictability onto the word.
Actually, we haven't touched on my beliefs yet which are a little more exotic. I'm merely criticising your belief atm.
It only takes one observation where the initial state is fully known, and where the assumption of determinism leads to a single expected outcome, and to not achieve that regularity of outcome, for that assumption of determinism to be ruled out. This could be, for instance, a new experiment that tests whether QM is Copenhagen-like or MWI-like. Or it could just be throwing a ball in the air and seeing it change trajectory mid-flight. That such non-deterministic outcomes are conceivable means that determinism can be falsified at any moment. And despite centuries of experimentation from Galileo to CERN, we've yet to see a single such event.
This does not prove determinism true, of course. Gun to my head, I'd wager on a deterministic resolution to the measurement problem, after which an assumption like Popper's that the natural universe is fundamentally non-deterministic would be quite mad.
Fully known? You have any example of something that can be fully known?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Balls have been thrown up and down before, and we do seem to have difficulties predicting their trajectory. You've heard of the Galton box?
This actually happens all the time. An outcome is predicted, the experiment is done, and the outcome is not what has been predicted. It's the basic scientific process.
However, the conclusion is never "determinism is false". It's always a specific "law" that is amended to account for the observation. And hence we get a more encompassing model of the universe.
So if we ever experienced a thrown ball exhibiting random movements, we'd come up with a system of physics that predicts those movements given the circumstances. In a way, that is exactly what happened with Quantum physics. The experimental results of setups like the "quantum eraser" are utterly bizzarre from the viewpoint of classical mechanics.
Yes, lots of experiments have relied on initial states prepared to high precision.
Quoting Olivier5
Yes, and that is a great example of unknowability in a chaotic system yielding unpredictable behaviour at a classical scale, but it is not shown to be an example of non-deterministic behaviour. A coin toss exemplifies the same principle. I do not know whether it will land heads or tails because I cannot personally model the flipping action. A robot would fare better. Similarly one could conceive of a version of the Galton box where the initial trajectory of the ball is precisely prepared, along with arbitrarily precise optical measurements to account for error, and one could determine the final resting place of the ball this way. The absence of such precision in preparation and measurement is why this is a problem of knowability, not determinism.
Note:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
High precision is different from full precision, and you know it. Or you should know it. Perfect precision of measurement of initial conditions is impossible. So you will have to think a bit more creatively than starting with "fully known initial conditions". That's never going to happen.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
So, 1) you propose throwing a ball as an attempt to falsify determinism, 2) I show you some balls being thrown and landing on the ground haphazardly, and 3) you say: "no no no this doesn't count".
Ergo, determinism is not falsifiable. It's metaphysical.
I get what you're saying, a single, fixed deviation isn't the same as constantly changing results.
But effects on the micro scale do exhibit constantly changing results. And it is important to remember, when doing these kinds of thought experiments, that we're not talking about the world suddenly changing from one set of rules to the other. We would of course notice if tennis balls suddenly started exhibiting erratic flight patterns. But this is because we have already extensively catalogued the behaviour of classical objects. The question is whether what we are and have been seeing is determinism or merely sufficiently deterministic behaviour.
It only has to be known to the requisite precision of the experiment. In the Galton box, this would be extremely high, but not necessarily perfect. In the case of throwing balls in the air to catch them, little precision is required.
Quoting Olivier5
Do you want to refer back to my criteria for falsification? Throwing balls haphazardly is a tractable problem, but unless you know how you're throwing them, it is not a knowable one. It is not beyond out current technology to fire a tennis ball at a precise point on a wall, for instance. Throwing them like a maniac disproves nothing.
Agreed, but it's important to be aware of why, and not lump unknowns, intractability, and genuine non-determinism into one catch-all. Otherwise you get Olivier5's claim that randomly chucking balls about demonstrates non-determinism.
Taking a moment of perspective, everything you're doing on this site relies on your expectation of regularity. You do not seriously expect the E key on your keyboard to spit out a random character on the screen. We are all comfortable with the idea that science-driven technology manifests regularity with utmost reliability. One must measure this against claims that the Universe is fundamentally random and ask: which seems to explain my experience?
If you don't know exactly what the original conditions are, how can you expect your predictions to be exact?
Even if you say (as actually done in real science) "we can predict a result within a certain margin of error commensurate with (or calculated based on) the margin of error in initial conditions", what you are testing in such an experiment is just whatever law or principle you're testing, the deterministic law you use to derive final conditions from initial conditions. But you're not testing all the other possible deterministic theories that could be invented, are you? Therefore, if your prediction is not exact, if it is off by a greater margin than expected, it won't disprove determinism at all. It will just disprove that particular law you tested.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Yes. Let's do a little bit of analytical work here on your criteria for falsification. Especially since I've never come across those criteria before, and yet have read 90% of Popper's opus, and he's the guy who came up with the criterion of falsifiability in the first place... which means that your criteria appear very much to be your criteria. So let's see some definitions.
I'm not convinced you've understood me at all. The phrasing for knowability I gave above was "all relevant information". For an experiment that is insensitive to the exact position and momentum of a ball, the exact position and momentum of the ball is not relevant information. For an experiment that is sensitive to these, the initial state is not knowable, and thus the experiment is not a good test for the theory's presumed determinism, or its null hypothesis. So this is really not a useful non sequitur.
Again, in order to falsify the presumed determinism, it is necessary to consider experiments that are knowable (we have all information), tractable (we can make sufficiently accurate predictions of expected deterministic behaviour), and unpredictable (regular behaviour is not manifest). That is required in order to discern deterministic behaviour from non-deterministic behaviour. Anything else is irrelevant.
I am not trying to demonstrate non-determinism. In fact my argument is that it's essentially impossible to do so. All absudities we can come up with rely for their absurdity on the contrast with the real world as we experience it. But if that world is not actually deterministic then of course a non-deterministic world looks exactly like our world.
Anyways, I think your first sentence illustrates that. Why, or rather how, do we know what the things we observe on the micro scale actually signify?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
But who are we asking? Ourselves. Are we an unbiased observer? There doesn't seem to be a reason to think that our brains are somehow designed to answer the question.
I think you’re misreading Kenosha. He isn’t proposing alternative criteria for falsification generally. He’s saying what criteria would need to be met specifically to falsify determinism. Every hypothesis will have specific criteria by which to falsify it. He's suggesting the criteria by which determinism could be falsified. In other words, what observations would show that determinism was false.
Determinism is true if and only if:
- given a particular state of affairs,
- and the laws of nature,
- a particular future state of affairs is guaranteed.
So to prove determinism false, you need to:
- know a particular state of affairs
- know the laws of nature
- observe something contrary to what those ought to guarantee
Those are basically his three criteria.
Your chances to draw 10 times 'head' in a row are 1/1024.
Your chances to draw 100 times 'head' are 1 / 10^30 or thereabouts.
Your chances to draw 1000 times 'head' are approximately 1 / 10^301. That's
0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 if I'm not mistaken.
You think you can draw heads a billion times? You want to calculate the odds of that?
Can you explain this in more detail? Why would a non-deterministic world appear like ours? Why would a non-deterministic world "appear" at all? You possess genes passed down faithfully over thousands of generations through sexual acts repeated over thousands of generations. That's not happening in a universe without that deterministic regularity. There's no reason to expect the same act to achieve the same thing billions of times over, the same useful gene to be replicated billions of times over.
Quoting Echarmion
Almost certainly our brains are evolved to identify deterministic behaviour. And the overwhelmingly likely explanation for that given natural selection is that it is useful. Identifying causality in a non-deterministic world doesn't seem useful. There would be no benefit in a frog being able to predict where the fly will be in 0.5 seconds such that it can flick out its tongue in the right direction if the fly's trajectory is random. Therefore such a characteristic would not evolve. We are inclined towards determinism because the universe seems deterministic, not the other way around.
And, as I keep saying, you don't to devise a particular experiment. Any experiment that fulfils those criteria would suffice. The important thing would be the measurement that is inconsistent with the presumption of determinism.
Your criteria are Chinese to me. Give me one example of an experiment that could disprove determinism. The question is very simple.
Through gritted teeth... all relevant information
You are not God, are you?
Okay, so then if you take a radioactive material, where there are a few mol of atoms decaying, you can be sure there is something going wrong if hitting that 2^-100 probability in finding a non-decayed atom?
Quoting Olivier5
If the relevant information required omniscience, it would not be a good test for determinism. Gimme a holler when you acquire the ability to retain information.
That is why you are incapable of thinking of an experiment disproving determinism. It's not your fault; it cannot be done.
What is your fault, really, is your hubris, your way of thinking as if you were God, to assume you can know all relevant information about a certain situation, for instance. This is ridiculous, sorry to say, and not worth my time. How the heck would you know that you know all relevant information, pray tell? You have an all-relevant-information meter hidden somewhere that we should know about?
Why would random fluctuations in the wave function collapse into precisely the effects we experience as classical mechanics? Prima facie, the way the universe actually appears to work is absurd, at least to our everyday notions. Until the second half of the 20th century, the assumption behind determinism was that the universe was an actual, mechanical mechanism. But we haven't found the cogs and wheels, indeed what we did find is completely strange. And we still haven't figured out how it all fits together. Doesn't that show that what appears to be a determined, "mechanical" apparatus can turn out to be anything but?
We just know that it's sufficiently predictable to get cars, planes and microscopic electronics. That proves that the universe isn't so random as to prevent these kinds of predictions. And yet everyone one of us can easily set up an experiment where the outcome is dependant on a random quantum fluctuation, and according to our current understanding, there is no way to predict that exact outcome.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
How would we know the difference though? This kind of evolutionary argument always presupposes that the end result is in fact selected for. But we know that not every attribute of every organism is actually selected for. Some are random in an evolutionary sense, i.e. they aren't actually the result of any selection pressure.
It's the same with determinism more generally. We assume "the" universe is deterministic because we can make all these predictions. But what this fails to recognise is that the predictions are our universe. There aren't two universes, the "real" and the "model" in our mind. Whatever "the" objective universe may be, the universe in our mind is a collection of predictions. We don't check these against an objective reference point somewhere. It's only when new information does not fit the pattern at all that we re-evaluate and then only to find a new solution that is "good enough". Maybe the result is something that looks like the "real" universe. But maybe it's a weird jury rig, like so many of the results of evolution are.
Thats trivial. Just as trivial as that there is no proof of anything. The casino can get him out without having to justify it. Just as there is no objective criterion to dismiss a theory. I remember a cite from Popper stating that one could know how things are not. In statistics this is not the case. In this sense Popper was outdated by theories that do not care about truth but about usefulness or buisiness values.
Again, not relevant. Newton's laws are sufficient to wang a probe around the solar system for a few decades and land it in your back garden. Tackling this with GR would again be intractable. But even more broadly, Galileo was able to make perfectly good predictions about balls rolling down inclined planes without knowledge of general relativity, or whatever true law GR is an approximation to.
Quoting Olivier5
Yes, that's true. I could write down a mathematical formula that describes how a ball released from a box will accelerate upward into the sky at 9.8 m/s/s then find that my theory is wrong. But, as I've already explained, that is irrelevant. What would be relevant is if I released the ball and sometimes it stayed still, sometimes it flew upward, sometimes it disappeared completely, sometimes it quoted Shakespeare. If that happened, with all relevant information about the ball available to me and no conditions in the setup that made me either predict those outcomes deterministically or lead me to believe I could not make a prediction that would discern deterministic from non-deterministic behaviour -- and no such possibilities spring to mind -- I would not expect a new deterministic theory to explain it and would likely consider determinism well and truly falsified.
The tractability of a problem is relevant insofar as I can have some expectation of what outcomes would be considered consistent or inconsistent with determinism. For instance, the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment is intractable because I cannot solve the time-dependent many-body wavefunction of a radioactive isotope, radioactivity detector, hammer, glass vial of poison gas, cat and box. I can have no real expectations of an outcome, and no means of establishing whether repeated experiments are at all comparable.
Irrespective of the particular theory of gravity, I do have the means to compare what happens to a ball released from a box. It is a tractable problem. What the final state of the ball is is not important. The phenomenon could be completely non-deterministic and still consistent with a deterministic theory if I only check once. What is deterministic is being able to repeat the same experiment under the same conditions (to whatever precision is relevant) and expect the same result.
You are doing this already btw. Whenever I hear this sort of thing I can't not chuckle, because there you sit, hitting keys on your keyboard with utmost expectation and surety that when you hit the key T a T (or t, as you select) will appear on your screen in the expected place and when you hit send it will with complete fidelity appear on everyone else's screen precisely where you intended, as you explain to us that the universe is not deterministic. I would wager that, were it a R in place of a T, you would blame yourself for a typo rather than blame the complex infrastructure we have for its lack of fidelity or the Universe for its lack of determinism. Your sheer persistence in arguing for a non-deterministic world is a testament to how deterministic you really know the world to be. And there's quantum mechanics involved in that process between you hitting a key and me reading your T to boot.
I found that no amount of explanation is going to demonstrate how that question demonstrates zero understanding.
Do as you please, but don't expect kudos for it.
I expect you to understand it at some point, but perhaps not today.
There are no random fluctuations in the wavefunction. In even the probabilistic interpretations of QM the wavefunction evolves deterministically under a wave equation until measurement.
Quoting Echarmion
Well QM is certainly absurd according to everyday notions, whether it proves deterministic or not.
Quoting Echarmion
Definitely. I'm not arguing for a deterministic view of QM though. Whether QM is Copenhagen-like or MWI-like is not within our grasp atm. I'll go where the evidence goes. But by the same token, it can't be used as proof that the universe is macroscopically or microscopically non-deterministic.
Quoting Echarmion
Or indeed any kind of prediction at the moment. It is unfortunate and perhaps not uncoincidental that the realm of physics where determinism is in doubt is the one where we cannot make predictions. We can't solve the equations even crudely for measurement apparatus. That's a huge problem.
But what you're talking about here is Popper's indeterminacy of the gaps. This presumably fundamental randomness of the universe is weirdly constrained to whatever our peak technological capability ends up being.
Quoting Echarmion
Such as? There's the supposed junk DNA, but they are not physical characteristics that can be provided for. If there is a characteristic that benefits us, there has to be an environment in which that benefit can be exploited. Or God, I suppose. Something, anyway, that persists useful characteristics from generation to generation for hundreds of thousands of years, despite evolution apparently being purely random. ???
Quoting Echarmion
Very true, science is not divine revelation. But we do have consensus. A non-deterministic theory of nature not only had to explain why you experience the same phenomena under identical circumstances, but why everyone else does so too. So far, no one has reported that a ball on an inclined plane had a 50/50 chance of rolling up.
That may well be the case. But people who do not care about truth don't usually succeed very long. Everything is that trivial in the end: it's about probabilities, always. There is no full certainty about much. All we know in biology is based on stats for instance. And yet it works. We're learning useful stuff.
People... usually know that everything has it's place. This is why there is not too much arguing about maths being a "sure" basis for empirical science. Even if the content can only be described via probabilities it is simply not true that
Quoting Olivier5
you'd either have to say there is no certainty about nothing or consider metaphysics.
Schroedinger's cat may well know if it is alive or not.
I do consider metaphysics, I don't discard them. Every body got some metaphysics or another. Mine is that the universe is open, evolutive, not predetermined, and thus that time is not redundant, and that we can be free.
Right, I tend to mix this up. What I was getting at is that classical mechanics arise from events that are not mechanical, and not determined in the way that interactions are in classical mechanics.
This isn't proof that the universe is non-deterministic. I have already pointed out that I am not trying to prove the nature of the universe to you. What I am saying is that the experience with classical mechanics should be a cautionary tale for everyone who assumes the universe must be deterministic based on everyday phenomena.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Isn't that essentially Einstein's argument of the hidden mechanics? There is no evidence, right now, that the uncertainty can be resolved.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Lots of organs are weird and inefficient. The human eyeball is a common example, as are various vestigial limbs found in species.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
We already have a theory that explains how lots of individually non determined events combine into sufficiently deterministic phenomena. Interference patterns. Again this isn't "proof". I obviously have no idea how the universe " really" works.
What I mean is that as we measure, say, the spin of a neutron to ever greater precision, the degree of freedom of non-determinism to show its face gets ever smaller.
Quoting Echarmion
Ah, but that doesn't mean they weren't selected for. We have an appendix that is useless to us, but we are descended from grass eaters.
Quoting Echarmion
It can't be proven. My point was just that you have an extremely simple explanation for consensus -- determinism -- or a really complicated and dubious one.
It's not complicated to abandon an hypothesis, especially when it makes no pragmatic difference whatsoever.
Can I ask... Is English your first language?
Okay cool. Sorry, it's come across several times like you're willfully misunderstanding everything. Obviously there's a slight language barrier and I should have considered that. My bad.
You could start with the following principles:
1. In no situation can we possibly know all relevant information about a case, and even if by miracle we did know everything relevant about a case, we couldn't be sure of it.
2. We can never measure anything exactly, there's always a margin of error.
3. We can never be sure that any of our scientific theories is true.
So all we got are uncertain theories and unprecise measurements about an incomplete list of variables. Let that sink in for a second.
Now, determinism states that IF we knew with exactitude all there is to know about a state of affairs at time t; and IF we knew all the laws of nature; and IF we had infinite computation capacity; THEN we could predict exactly the state of affairs at time t + x.
The first two conditions will never be met. The third one would require infinite energy and time so it will never happen... None of these conditions will ever apply in our human lives. So much so that determinists appeal to various demons in their demonstrations, like the Laplace's demon.
Ergo determinism is perhaps a usable theory for demons, but it says nothing relevant to the human condition and the possibility of human knowledge.
If this were true, science wouldn't work, technology wouldn't work. One has to be able to know a sufficient amount of information in order to guarantee regularity of outcome and if we can do that -- which we clearly can -- then we can know what we need to know. This regularity of outcome is itself determinism.
Quoting Olivier5
Error is not the same as non-determinism. Particle physicists can measure the magnetic moment of a neutron to within [math]10^-29[/math]. That doesn't mean that because there is error, that quantity is not determined, and tomorrow someone could measure it as 1000 it's measured value. It just means there are technological limits to measurement. We would still see neutrons respond the same way to the same magnetic field, which is determinism. Error is not a path to non-determinism: non-deterministic behaviour is.
Quoting Olivier5
You quote Popper like he's an authority, but demand proof? As I've said before, you don't need to know about general relativity to know that a ball on an inclined plane will roll downhill. That is also determinism.
Quoting Olivier5
That adds nothing. The above is only important IF we also wanted to know the exact position of every particle at some future date. To know whether a ball will roll downhill or uphill, none of that information is relevant.
Indeterminism says that some things are predetermined to a degree, but not necessarily everything and not necessarily to a perfect degree. We can make predictions and observations within a non-deterministic framework. QM scientists and biologists and sociologists and scores of other disciplines do it all the time.
Yes, this is indeterminism-of-the-gaps. As our technology improves, error reduces, and this alleged non-determinism of nature is obliged to retreat. It is not a compelling or useful story.
And QM is not a gap. Randomness is systemic in it, and it applies supposedly to the entire universe.
And yet when you rewind a VHS and play it again, you do expect exactly the same movie, not a random one. ??? That's real. Magically rewinding the universe is not.
What this comes down to, then, is taste. Irrespective of how much experience you have that doing the same thing in the same way produces the same result, you don't like the idea of predetermination so say the universe is random. Fine. But the universe isn't obliged to cater for your taste.
Quoting Olivier5
Yes, it is. We don't know whether the universal wavefunction is Copenhagen-like or MWI-like or something else. It remains to be seen.
That's not where the uncertainty comes from, the way I understand it. The uncertainty is fundamental. Not all values of the system can be known at a time, and the values that are not known can only be expressed as probabilities.
Where a photon strikes the screen in a double slit experiment is not, in principle, predictable with certainty. It can only be measured, but this merely moves the uncertainty to it's speed.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Sure, we can create plausible theories to explain how certain vestigial or otherwise weird anatomies came about. But that doesn't establish that the end result was selected for. Only that there wasn't sufficient pressure to select for a different result. Meanwhile, your argument, if applied to e.g. the appendix, would lead one to look for the benefits the appendix provides to modern humans to explain its existence.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Why do we need an explanation in the first place? Explanations are tools for specific ends, not an inherent necessity.
Exactly, and hence determinism is a rather esoteric idea.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
And likewise, you don't like the idea of randomness and you try to erase it from your POV, when I see it everywhere around me. To each his own metaphysics...
Isn't this a misconception? Not being able to measure position and speed of a particle does not necessarily mean it ain't at an exact position and speed at a given time. It is trivial that one cannot measure the speed of a car non-intrusively by crashing another car into it.
This is the point where empirical science is bound by it's metaphysical starting point, i.e. that the observable universe is the universe. You will never observe ideal concepts like free will.
Determinism is not dependent on being able to rewind the universe.
Quoting Olivier5
As I said, you don't know my position. It would probably surprise you.
Quoting Heiko
It's not a misconception that you cannot. There is a version of QM called Bohmian mechanics in which particles do have exact position and momentum simultaneously. It is not well liked for other reasons.
I think we're speaking at cross purposes; possibly I misunderstood your earlier point. Reading back, what I think you were referring to was random fluctuations in fields, i.e. creation and annihilation of particles whose lifetimes are consistent with the uncertainty principle. At any given time during an electron's trajectory, for instance, there is a finite probability that a virtual photon will be created by some distant charge that will scatter the electron. Since this is always true, the probability of it happening approaches 1. This is the gist of the quantum field theory of the electric force.
Quoting Echarmion
Yes, plausible. Compared to hypothesising that entire organs came into being for no reason, or that a magical man made it for no reason. If we go that route, it becomes a mystery why we don't all have organs that not only serve us no purpose, but served no purpose for any of our ancestors, in addition to the mystery of how. The resolution of that mystery is natural selection.
Bear in mind the starting point for this tangent was the claim that life has evolved characteristics that could not have been selected for. That still remains unshown.
Quoting Echarmion
???? My argument is that characteristics that benefited our ancestors can be passed down to us whether they benefit us or not. Evolution would not be a deterministic process if organs disappeared the moment they became useless.
Quoting Echarmion
Fine, don't seek explanations then.
I think Oliver’s point is that we can never be sure whether any observed failure of predictability is due to nature being non-deterministic or just because our measurements and theories etc are imperfect: the answer to whether or not everything in the universe is perfectly deterministic if forever hidden beyond the limits of our knowledge, which while ever-growing is never absolute. So we can’t answer for sure whether determinism is true or not.
I think Kenosha’s point is that despite the above, indeterminism sorta has the burden of proof here, because so far everything that we have been able to know has turned out to behave deterministically, so we should expect that to continue to be the case as the limits of our knowledge push further and further out. If something seems unpredictable at the moment, it’s probably just because of shortcomings on our measurements or theories, not because it’s inherently random.
I think that even more than indeterminism just having the burden of proof, we pragmatically always must assume that it is false and that we merely haven’t developed the right theories or made accurate enough measurements to make accurate predictions yet. Because to do otherwise is simply to give up on trying to figure out what the deterministic laws behind things are. It’s true that there always might be none, but we can never know for sure that there are none, only that we can’t tell what they are YET. So all we can do is just choose one way or the other: either give up hope of ever figuring it out, or at least TRY by assuming that we can.
Yes. The Universe appears to behave deterministically... We can write down formulae to predict outcomes and find them reliable: x in, y out. (With or without error bars.) If the universe were non-deterministic, it would have to seem deterministic, and thus any evidence of determinism would automatically be worthless. For that reason, this kind of constrained non-determinism is unfalsifiable: no evidence can disprove it. This is the same problem as the God-of-the-gaps argument.
However we should, in this non-deterministic universe, expect some behaviour that cannot be generalised well. There should be mysteries as to why we cannot predict outcomes. These could falsify determinism, and the measurement problem may well be a good example. But since unfortunately we have equally good/bad deterministic and non-deterministic theories for this, neither backed by knowability or tractability, the jury is out for now.
Probably. We seem to be misunderstanding each other pretty much across the board.
I am really just talking about the probabilistic quality of QM, the fact that e.g. at what exact time an atom of a radioactive element decays appears random.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I never made that claim though. All I said is that not all properties of an organism are necessarily selected for.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I was referring to your argument before that argument, but since you're talking to multiple people I should have reiterated.
What you wrote was that since we evolved to see deterministic patterns, it stands to reason this conferred a survival advantage, and is hence evidence that the universe is really deterministic.
This is presupposing that every attribute we have right now confers a survival advantage. But that's not the case.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I just think it's important to recognise that some things cannot be explained in a meaningful way. Seeking explanations for everything sends you down metaphysical rabbit holes that people tend to eventually fill up with gods.
QM is a good example, because I don't see a reason to suspect that whatever the fundamental forces of the observed universe are can then be further explained or interpreted. If such forces exist, and it's not turtles all the way down.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I think this is a misunderstanding of how we construct our reality. There'd be nothing mysterious about the unpredictable outcomes. They'd just be things that the natural laws make difficult to predict. Like weather patterns. We'd still get quite good at it if it was probabilistic instead of deterministic.
But it's dependent on knowing the laws of the universe, which is equally esoteric.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Now I'm curious, do expound.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
It's non local, in particular. Which means you can never isolate any sub-set of events from the rest of the universe in any calculation. This is the Eye Of God hypothesis: One Logos Tying The Whole World In One Very Long And Convoluted, Yet Eternally Predetermined Sentence Which Will Never End Contrary To This One.
So, yes, radioactive decay is an example of a quantum field theory, the electroweak theory. But it isn't characterised by atoms or hadrons either spitting out or not spitting out components at random. The system evolves deterministically through both paths simultaneously, both decaying and not decaying, until the wavefunction collapses/universe branches/superposition decoheres/whatever else happens to yield singular observables.
Quoting Echarmion
That doesn't follow. It just needs to have conferred a survival advantage to our ancestors.
Quoting Echarmion
What do you mean, difficult to predict? For instance, would it make the vertical component of motion of a ball on an inclined plane difficult to predict?
I think this is demonstrably not true, but if you can prove that the lottery is behaving deterministically, you could earn millions...
No, it's not. Being able to approximate the laws of the universe well is dependent on the universe -- or at least the part of it being modelled -- behaving deterministically. The universe can behave deterministically without intelligent life modelling it. Intelligent life cannot model it scientifically if it isn't there.
Quoting Olivier5
Perhaps in another thread, but it's basically a mish-mash of transactional quantum mechanics and many-worlds interpretation: determinism forwards and backwards in time.
Quoting Olivier5
That's true more generally, e.g. the EPR paradox is an example of ultra-nonlocal behaviour. Ultra-nonlocal behaviour was actually the subject of my PhD. That sort of behaviour is not problematic in transactional QM.
Interestingly, I've just found this paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-56357-3#ref-CR29
This argues that nature is fundamentally stochastic. This is not necessarily random, though. Stochastic modelling is suitable for the sorts of unknowable or intractable deterministic processes previously discussed.
And the result of all this is that we cannot predict the exact time an individual atom will decay. We can only give probabilities for timeframes, correct?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Right. Of course when talking about evolution, only the ancestors matter, since individuals don't evolve. But I think that my point still holds if we clarify "survival advantage to some ancestor". For example, it might be caused by a random (in an evolutionary sense) mutation that just happened to occur this generation. Traits might also genetically linked, so that a trait that actually does nothing to improve inclusive genetic fitness becomes dominant because it's linked to other traits that do.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
We could imagine that the motion is probabilistic, but with such a narrow Amplitude (is that the right word) that the inaccuracies wouldn't matter for everyday purposes.
Stochastic
Having a random probability distribution or pattern that may be analysed statistically but may not be predicted precisely.
Well, that's what I'm saying. Nature behaves as if there was some randomness in there...
Stochastic methods are used for all sorts of intractable deterministic, statistical applications.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Double whammy. It wasn't enough one way?
Yes, that is the measurement problem. At a given time, we know how much of the wavefunction should be |decayed> and how much |undecayed> but we don't know which we'll see when we measure.
Quoting Echarmion
That would still be selected for. Sickle cell disease is an example. It confers a survival disadvantage in and of itself, but ends up making the odds of survival greater. If sickle cell disease conferred no survival benefit due to immunity from malaria, it would have been eliminated from the genome due to its survival disadvantage.
Quoting Echarmion
Which is back to the non-determinism of the gaps: anywhere where it might show its face it is obliged to hide in tiny error bars.
Indeed. Point being you can't read 'stochastic' and infer 'non-deterministic'. For instance, Brownian motion is modelled stochastically. That is not to say that collision events are random, simply that the particles involved have unknown initial states that, were they known, could not be feasibly tracked over time, but nonetheless are statistically predictable.
I can do so very easily. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck.... Why would I not infer that it's a duck?
As you will, but if you are aware that stochastic methods are used to model deterministic processes and yet insist that anything modelled stochastically is random, you do give up the right to be taken seriously.
So, let me get this straight... You are aware that stochastic methods are employed to model both random and intractable, statistical systems. And you're not insisting that something modelled stochastically is automatically therefore random. So presumably you're telling me that the above paper is using stochastic methods to model something that looks random, i.e. walks like a duck. Walk us through that.
When I see a phenomenon that displays a behavior resembling randomness (eg the Galton box and its results plotted against a Gauss curve), I say it looks like randomness, and I'm going to treat it as such. Maybe that's what it is ontologically. Or maybe not, but ontology is for metaphysicians. As far as science is concerned, the theories and tools that can successful model such a phenomenon are probabilistic. If one wants to study such stochastic phenomena, even for the purpose of finding some determinism in them, one will have to use probabilities, which are the best way to think of such phenomena that we have found so far.
When you see a stochastic pattern, you immediately conclude that no randomness could possibly be at play, because you don't like the idea.
So if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, you conclude that it cannot be a duck because ducks don't exist. Hence it must be an elephant.
No, I understand that, that is, as you say, very simple. Simplistic, even.
You said the above paper 'looks like a duck', i.e. "displays a behaviour resembling randomness". Can you walk us through that reasoning please?
Okay, so irrespective of the actual physics, if we use stochastic methods to model them, they're random. So when I said:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
you really were insisting that anything modelled stochastically is random, irrespective of whether it is.
did you fail to understand?
At best, your essentialist argument forces you to look for patterns in the noise, and that's a good thing. Nobody should ever stop at apparent randomness. Of course it's a good thing to try and understand further a stochastic phenomenon and to do that, postulating some hidden order as a working hypothesis is a prerequisite. But a working hypothesis is quite different from some absolute cosmic ontological a priori statement...
But in the Copenhagen interpretation the probabilistic model really is only just a working hypothesis. Ontologically there is Heisenbergs uncertainty principle which states that certain properties cannot be measured without influencing the system (i.e. shoot photons at other small bodies without playing billiard) or measure a frequency exactly at a given point in time (as frequency is defined as N/dt).
What you seem to do is to take an interpretation which states itself "this is NOT the reality but just a model", say "look! the reality is probabilistic" and then even come back at people who point out, that without getting metaphysical, you cannot even make the statement that "6 of 10 cases" equates to 60% "probability".
I dunno. If Olivier5 wants to interpret things as he does this has to be accepted I guess. If there appears to be a 60% probability of something happening declaring that appearance for the truth is surely not unthinkable. God himself does not know where that photon is, then. One could argue about the value of such a theory but there is no logical reason to reject it per se. Of course it cannot be proven and such proofs can be pointed out as fallacious.
The important point to realize is that neither determinism nor indeterminist can ever be proven true or false, as they are statements about the ultimate nature of reality. So we don't need to worry about it. It's a bit like the sex of angels.
Oh, the importance of points is again something that is based on value, not on truth. Didn't you point out such a thing as problematic?
No, I didn't.
I take that as a critical statement then and return the favor. No hard feelings.
And that's a fundamental problem. I.e. we cannot just improve our measuring apparatus in some way. Either we come up with new physics, or this stays, whether it's an actual ontological reality or not?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
That's not necessarily a definition of "selected for" that I'd be comfortable with, but we can probably differentiate in at least three categories: Traits directly selected for based on a fitness advantage, Traits indirectly selected for based on a fitness advantage of a linked Trait, and random traits.
Your second sentence is problematic though. There is no evolutionary mechanism by which traits that confer a fitness disadvantage are removed. The populations were those are present either die out or they don't. If they don't die out, because the selection pressure isn't strong enough, the trait will endure as well.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I think that's a matter of perspective. A bayesian might well argue that far from the world appearing to be deterministic, it actually appears probabilistic. That from an epistemological perspective, nothing like the surety that determinism theoretically provides actually exists for practical applications.
That's right, which is why I cited the measurement problem as a potential disproof of determinism. Unfortunately we don't have a testable theory of measurement to see whether it is random (Copenhagen-like) or deterministic (MWI-like).
Quoting Echarmion
Yes there is: death!
Quoting Echarmion
I would wonder why he was arguing anything unless he was pretty certain he'd be understood.
This has been cropping up in both conversations currently touching on determinism, so for the sake of getting a different perspective, I'll ask again here - am I missing something in not seeing this relationship? Determinism is the theory that every event is the result it's causes, probabilistic thinking (or stochastic for that matter) is about our ability to know with certainty what that event will be given the causes. The two are not only mutually compatible, they're not even in the same subject area, I'm lost as to why they keep getting treated as mutually exclusive options for the 'way the world is'.
Yes, the net is being cast very broadly in what constitutes randomness. Our ignorance, the complexity of the system, and the sensitivity of its laws to initial conditions are apparently all the same thing as wavefunction collapse. Seek and ye shall find.
That is the definition of causality, not determinism. Maybe we should try and define what we are talking about a bit better. My understanding is that determinism requires that every given set of causes results in one and only one possible set of effects. The effect is determined in the sense that the solution to the equation is always supposed to be unique.
If a given set of causes can result in several possible effects, then the effects are not fully determined and thus we are in an indeterminist outlook.
Perhaps it's a matter of different definitions of the terms.
The strictest form of determinism would be a mechanical determinism, where the state of the system at any given time can be exactly known if the state at one specific time is known. That would mean events are "mechanically" connected, so that each event has fixed connection to each other event.
The strictest form of non-determinism would be a world where events have absolutely no connection whatsoever.
Is it conceivable that there is a world where events have connections, but the connections are not mechanical? That is, for a given state at T0, more than one future state of the system is possible?
Edit: that's all still presuming time, events and states are ontological categories, which they might not be.
Yes, that's the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.
I've not heard this definition anywhere - perhaps you could cite a source? The key aspect is the bolded terms. I've heard no-one ever talk about determinism in terms of 'given' causes, only in terms of 'actual' causes. It's would be an utterly ludicrous claim and refuted within seconds, to say that any 'given' set of causes will result in only one outcome - all I have to do to refute that is give an insufficient set of causes. say a coin flip where the only cause I give is the movement of the thumb doing the flipping (nothing about air turbulence, coin weighting etc). I seriously doubt anyone believes that.
Quoting Echarmion
Certainly conceivable, I think, but our inability to determine future states based on states at T0 is of uncertain ancestry, we don't know why we don't know. That's why I think the link between our uncertainty (probabilistic relations) and determinism (the nature of those relations, of which our theories are just models) is a poorly supported one.
Any useful injection of an indeterministic interpretation of uncertainty at a macro scale has to compete with (and posit alternatives to) physical causation. The neurological basis of decision-making, for example, which started this discussion, needs, under indeterministic interpretations, some mechanism whereby physical action is brought about without physical causation. QM is often invoked as the mechanism, but so far resolves to classical mechanics at a cellular scale, so cannot account for it.
The alternative explaination for uncertainty (there are literally millions of neurons firing at once and each takes a slightly different route and has done since birth, hence chaos). Requires the invention of no mechanism not already posited and explains the phenomena without flaw.
So, insofar as we don't know what the source of our uncertainty is, it seems odd to invoke new mysterious mechanisms when the ones we already have explain it perfectly well.
Your use of the word "system" in this post is somewhat misleading. "System" implies boundaries which distinguish internal from external, but the boundaries are positioned according to the judgement of the modeler. Therefore the distinction between the features which are internal to the system and the features which are external to the system is subjective, dependent of the intentions of the modeler.
Quoting Echarmion
Here, you seem to be referring to a system with no causes external to the system, external causation not being allowed for by your description of possible events within the system. But such a system, which is closed in an absolute way, is not a realistic proposition.
Well, Echarmion put the same idea much better than I could, so let's use his characterisation:
Quoting Echarmion
Quoting Isaac
I don't think this is a proven fact. Pretty large molecules have been found to display wave-particle duality, for instance. This said, I personally doubt the explication for "the hard problem" is as simple as quantic physics. There's a lot more we don't know in there.
So it's at least not absurd to assume some amount of ontological "randomness".
Quoting Isaac
As I alluded to a few pages ago, it seems to me that the question of whether the universe is "actually" deterministic is ill conceived. It makes no practical difference to our ability to make predictions.
Quoting Isaac
Physical causation is an interesting term. Is causation physical? Because causation doesn't actually seem to describe a physical process. It seems more like a value judgement by which we identify some part of the web of physical processes as the "cause" and another as the "effect".
Quoting Isaac
It's unclear to me what it means for "indeterminism to resolve to determinism at a cellular scale", except as a statement on our ability to predict outcomes. Physically, what actually happens always happens at the micro scale. The macro scale is a human construct. Not some arbitrary fantasy, of course, but still an abstraction based on our particular sensory and mental apparatus.
I'd agree with you in that the indeterminism we observe in physics doesn't really lend itself to a useful notion of free will. But it's still inherent in what happens in the brain, even if we can ignore it for the purpose of explaining human behaviour so far.
Quoting Isaac
Could you explain what you refer to as "our uncertainty" here? I don't really follow.
Not at all. It is possible that determinism holds at a statistical level. As I've said a few times, if we ever devise a test to discern whether QM is Copenhagen-like or MWI-like that is inconsistent with the latter, I would consider fundamental determinism falsified.
Until then, we cannot use QM as evidence for or against determinism. And there's no other player in the game. Unknown variables, chaotic systems, the inevitable error bars before and after, these all lead to behaviour obviously more consistent with determinism than randomness.
Since determinism is in principle falsifiable, and any fortuitously constrained non-determinism is not, determinism is the scientific choice.
Weaving out a system of axioms is not falsifiable either but that is exactly what mathematicians do all day long. And maths is often called the only pure science.
Despite what its often called, it's not science, it's art.
No, but as we have seen in both 'free-will' threads, it makes a difference to our default positions in the face of uncertainty.
Quoting Echarmion
Yes, I think that may be true (certainly if one has a grasp on some of the physics around time - which I certainly don't) I imagine it would seem very much that way. By physical causation here I just mean that some event in our physical universe can be assigned as the cause with reasonable grounds. It's justificatory rather than an holistic claim.
Quoting Echarmion
That's right. Basically we seem to be able to ignore whatever weirdness takes place at a quantum level because when it gets to a scale we actually experience it's almost all gone away even in those experiments which we can measure with high accuracy (classical physics). As such, when faced with much larger errors in, say, psychology, it seems unwarranted to me to suddenly assume this micro-scale indeterminacy is responsible rather than factors like experimental degrees of freedom, complexity etc.
Quoting Echarmion
Hopefully explained above. Just that if the cause of error in our experimental results can be explained with what we already know - complex systems dynamics, experimental degrees of freedom, hidden variables etc., and in experiments where these factors are lessened we do indeed see a lessening of error, then it seems unreasonable to invoke some other cause.
Falsification is a criterion of real science, i.e.the circular process of modelling, prediction and experiment.
Put this way, the choice is between: 1) assuming that the wheels of determinism have a little 'lash' between them (indeterminism), and 2) assuming the existence of billions of billions of billions of parallel universes out there...
This is what I mean by your seeming wilful misunderstanding. I did not say the choices were Copenhagen or MWI. I chose my words carefully, you simply choose not to notice them.
Even with parallel universes determinism prevails because in each universe every event can have only one outcome (a priori). I think this view is called actualism. It denies that possibility is any more than a logical assessment of events.
Support or accommodate?
Let us start with a logical point: A theory cannot deny the possibility of its own existence, as a meaningful and possibly true theory. It's like the cogito applied to theories. Or Russel's paradox applied to theories. No theory can state that "no theory can possibly exist that make any sense". Because if such a theory is true, then it makes no sense.... It self destructs, in a way.
Therefore, any theory about the inner workings of the universe (or about human beings within it) must allow for its own emergence, in this very universe it describes, as a meaningful and possibly true theory.
This very simple, logical point rules out any 'naïve materialist' view eg epiphenomenalism. If thoughts are meaningless noise made by the brain, then the idea that thoughts are meaningless noise made by the brain is itself meaningless noise made by the brain. The theory undermines itself; it doesn't allow for its own emergence as a meaningful and possibly true theory.
Therefore, any determinist theory worth it's salt must consider theories and thus thoughts as meaningful and operative, causative. It must integrate thoughts as possible causes of events. That is to say, it must view our mental space as mechanistic and predetermined (of course, being deterministic), but an integral part of this cosmic cause and effect game of the universe.
Therefore supporting the concept of 'agency'.
This is in the vicinity of Schopenhauer, though I'm not fond of your logical progression.
Are you saying that volition is required to make an assertion?
Is it? How so?
Science (or philosophy) is an activity of the human mind. It implies human agency, capacity to observe, to reason, to speak and to act on this basis.
Spinoza is right on that train of thought: determinist in a rational way, that is to say in a way that allows for reason to exist and to work.
If I understand you correctly, meaning is the sticking point. You believe the existence of meaning implies volition. Or is it reason?
Quoting Olivier5
I dont know much about Spinoza. I think a key to understanding Schopenhauer is to see identity as fluid. You can identify with Cause.
Completely. It applies to any cogent process.
E.g. if I give you a shopping list and I tell that it's the result of some chemical reaction within a solution of water and proteins structured through a set of phospholipid membranes, you are less likely to do the implied shopping than if I tell you that your wife wrote it and expects you home at 6 with the turkey.
Quoting frank
Reason, and its effectiveness. Reason as a force in this world.
Quoting frank
Unfortunately, I don't know much about Schopenhauer.
Essentially, it points to the intuition that living things wouldn't just "bubble up" from random mechanics and chemistry. It's not as naive as it might look at first glance, but its famous weakness is that in inserting God as the explanation, it's added as many questions as it answered. Where did God come from?
Likewise, with reason and meaning, science presently has no explanation, and philosophy questions whether we could have the vantage point necessary to explain it. We're in Chalmers territory, right?
Into that cavern of unknowns, you place volition as a necessary ingredient, yet we have no schematic for reason and meaning. How is volition supposed to relate to things like math, the ability to imagine and hypothesize, and logic in general?
In the end, nothing has been explained. We've only pointed to the intuition that filling out a shopping list requires volition.
Yes, Spinoza's view. Note that this is NOT my view. I'm indeterminist. I think the universe is imperfectly predetermined, only partly so, that there is some 'lash' between the wheels of that celestial clock, that if God exists, He can't or won't predict the future. He'd rather play dices
But then in my view these very imperfections make our world better than a perfectly determinist world, because a world where not everything is prewritten can allow novelty to happen. An indeterminist universe would be less static than a determinist universe, more evolutive, and that's a good thing.
Didn't say it was.
Just wanted to clarify. Re God I mean
Cool, so you agreed with the thrust of that post: that the argument you presented boils down to the intuition that much of human behavior appears to be volitional.
Quoting frank
I don't have any complete answer to that but here would be my take.
Reason and meaning are things we experience daily. They are part of us. We strongly identify with our own thinking. We tend to think of our own thoughts as reasonable and meaningful, whether or not this is confirmed by others. This is the way of the mind: like any system it is made of elements, it is based on a certain axiomatic, an a priori set of tools. For instance the concepts of truth and meaning. You cannot think without using these concepts, because they underwrite your thinking. Another example is logic. Natural human logic is not exactly like mathematical logic but it's very close to it, as close as you can ever get between a human idea and its formal codification, I would guess. Another example of an a priori mental tool is a 3D euclidian space. You're born with it, it's part of the standard operating system.
Concepts such as truth or meaning are hard to analyse because you must assume them in any analysis. You cannot approach them 'from outside'. So when someone says: "meaning and truth do not exist", he naturally assumes that what he just said is meaningful and true, thereby contradicting himself. There's no exit, no way out of these concepts except madness. So let's use them, since we cannot do otherwise, even though we cannot anylse them productively. We have no other choice than trust our intuition of them; we are indeed predetermined to think in those terms.
As for 'volition', I am not sure what it means for you. My money is on something we cannot avoid but doing.
You have a bald assertion in your works, and I maintain that your argument collapses down to that assertion.
Fair enough. When you wrote those words quoted above, did you:
a) in fact want to say something else entirely, but these are the words that came out of your fingers interacting with the keyboard, somehow?
b) not want to say anything in particular, these are just words that came out of your fingers interacting with the keyboard in automatic writing mode?
c) have something you wanted to say, and after cursorly considering a few options, selected what appeared the best to say what you wanted to say?
d) other - please specify.
In other words, can you explain the emergence on TPF of the Volition definition above, as the power to chose, without referring to some act of will? Without invoking some sort of intent on your side?
It would not have emerged into this world if volition did not exist.
If 'volition' is defined as the capacity to select a unique option amongst several considered options, you display it everytime you write a post here and chose your words a bit carefully.
And if someone tells that your choice only appears deliberate but in fact it's not, because he says that we're just the puppets of your molecules... well, ask yourself why you should trust him, if he is indeed just a puppet of his own molecules and not a cogent, rational, logical thinker... The only reason we listen to others in the first place is because we assume that their thinking is potentially useful, and more meaningful than a chemical soup.
The true tragedy of life is NOT that we can't analyse 'meaning' or 'volition'; it is that we are trapped in meaning, and trapped in choice-making. To make sense of the world is our fate, not our choice. To act is our destiny, to chose, our principal function. Even not to act is a type of action, even not chosing is a form of choice... We are shackled to choice. We have no choice but to chose. That's the real tragedy of life.
That's why I find art and poetry and dreams and metidation useful, they help me get out of the choice analytics treadmill. Breathe a bit, take a break. Make room for mystery as a fact of life. It's important to losen the mental determinism a bit, to give one's mental chains some slack, and some rest.
[I]Laise un peu de vague à ton âme[/i], as the poet put it. Allow your soul to be a little vague.
This is actualism. It arises from simple logic more assuredly than the intuition that we're free. Logic never defeats that intuition, though.
So it seems it must be both.
That strikes me as hard to believe. But yeah, as long as human thoughts count for something, I would say that determinism is internally logical.
Maybe for you, but it was a cornerstone of the European medieval world view. The wheel of fortune was a symbol of it. It's just as much a part of human thought as the idea of freedom. This opposition is a source of dynamism in the realms of intellect, creativity, and ethics. Think of it as a spectrum that the pendulum of the soul wanders through. The extremes are beyond conception: either total freedom or, as you point out, the loss of the self in the monolith.
Quoting frank
Fortune is an ancient personification (deification) of randomness. The idea behind the wheel of fortune -- as I understand it -- is that one cannot be lucky or unlucky for very long; Fortuna is fickle and changing. Which is basically true, poetry set aside. Of course it was framed during early medieval times within a Christian discourse about God's intervention on earth, and therefore given a more determinist interpretation (God is behind apparent randomness, acting through it).
If we call it the spirit of life, its beauty and grandeur only come into focus from the vantage point of the grave.
And the day may come when you need to surrender and accept humanity as it is. Then you'll clearly see how the nazi comes to be and you'll know it could have been you. You were just lucky.
Quoting Olivier5
No it isn't.
O Fortuna
velut luna
statu variabilis,
semper crescis
aut decrescis;
vita detestabilis
nunc obdurat
et tunc curat
ludo mentis aciem,
egestatem,
potestatem
dissolvit ut glaciem.
Sors immanis
et inanis,
rota tu volubilis,
status malus,
vana salus
semper dissolubilis,
obumbrata
et velata
michi quoque niteris;
nunc per ludum
dorsum nudum
fero tui sceleris. ....
O Fortune,
like the moon
you are changeable,
ever waxing
ever waning;
hateful life
first oppresses
and then soothes
playing with mental clarity;
poverty
and power
it melts them like ice.
Fate – monstrous
and empty,
you whirling wheel,
you are malevolent,
well-being is vain
and always fades to nothing,
shadowed
and veiled
you plague me too;
now through the game
I bring my bare back
to your villainy. ...
In Carmina Burana
:hearts: