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Determinism: It's not your choice.
recurs|on
procrastinator generalRegistered User regular
procrastinator generalRegistered User regular
According to the search, there hasn't been a determinism thread here for at least 3 months. I guess one is meant to be? Blame me for starting one, or not, depending on whether you believe there was any way I could have chosen differently.
There's a bunch of controversy over the "Boxes" problem in the Rational Choice thread that, in my opinion, comes down to how one feels about determinism. Objections such as, "...but then there would be no free choice..." have been raised many times. Even in the very limited scenario of the problem, the possibility that one's choices could be predicted accurately ahead of time appears to cause some posters a fair amount of angst.
The sort of determinsim I'm talking about here is the "block universe" kind. Time is a fourth dimension. While the rules of entropy/thermodynamics allow information to flow much more easily in one time direction than the other, this is really no different than hills allowing balls to move more easily in one space direction than the other. It means the future is difficult to predict from our subjective point of view, but it does not mean it is not objectively fixed.
What about quantum mechanics, you might say? It could allow a small amount of indeterminacy at the macro level, though it is not clear that it really would. Even if it did, that would allow for randomness, not choice or free will. I doubt those skeeved-out by the notion of determinism would be greatly comforted that the only refuge from it would be random behaviour.
Personally, I think this kind of hard determinism is pretty likely. There is really not much room left in our understanding of the universe. Free will seems like a nearly perfect example of a god-of-the-gaps; it always seems to live in whatever crevices remain in our knowledge. When one is filled in, it shifts to another.
That said, our subjective experience is strongly one of free will, even if one believes that free will is not physically possible. Neither us nor anything around us can predict our future actions well enough to break this perception, and this will likely hold for some time. It is intuitively ridiculous that anyone or anything could know with certainty exactly what we might do even mere seconds into the future.
What about the possiblity of a divine/magical source for free will? How could we ever know if this was the case?
So, what say you? Is our universe deterministic? Is there any possibility of true, non-random free will for self-aware entities that are entirely contained within it? If so, how? What do you think the implications would be for human society, if any, were it to be proven one way or the other? If determinism was all but proven, would anyone care? Would anyone believe?
There's a bunch of controversy over the "Boxes" problem in the Rational Choice thread that, in my opinion, comes down to how one feels about determinism. Objections such as, "...but then there would be no free choice..." have been raised many times. Even in the very limited scenario of the problem, the possibility that one's choices could be predicted accurately ahead of time appears to cause some posters a fair amount of angst.
The sort of determinsim I'm talking about here is the "block universe" kind. Time is a fourth dimension. While the rules of entropy/thermodynamics allow information to flow much more easily in one time direction than the other, this is really no different than hills allowing balls to move more easily in one space direction than the other. It means the future is difficult to predict from our subjective point of view, but it does not mean it is not objectively fixed.
What about quantum mechanics, you might say? It could allow a small amount of indeterminacy at the macro level, though it is not clear that it really would. Even if it did, that would allow for randomness, not choice or free will. I doubt those skeeved-out by the notion of determinism would be greatly comforted that the only refuge from it would be random behaviour.
Personally, I think this kind of hard determinism is pretty likely. There is really not much room left in our understanding of the universe. Free will seems like a nearly perfect example of a god-of-the-gaps; it always seems to live in whatever crevices remain in our knowledge. When one is filled in, it shifts to another.
That said, our subjective experience is strongly one of free will, even if one believes that free will is not physically possible. Neither us nor anything around us can predict our future actions well enough to break this perception, and this will likely hold for some time. It is intuitively ridiculous that anyone or anything could know with certainty exactly what we might do even mere seconds into the future.
What about the possiblity of a divine/magical source for free will? How could we ever know if this was the case?
So, what say you? Is our universe deterministic? Is there any possibility of true, non-random free will for self-aware entities that are entirely contained within it? If so, how? What do you think the implications would be for human society, if any, were it to be proven one way or the other? If determinism was all but proven, would anyone care? Would anyone believe?
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Its a fun philosophical question though.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
Essentially, the universe does seem to be deterministic (although there is all sorts of interesting science and philosophy concerning causality, and whether it's "real" or "true," or whether our understanding of the nature of time and space is limited or plainly incorrect), and all human actions are determined. This discounts the traditional, oldschool notion of "free will" - that is, that a human being's actions are determined not by external and internal deterministic events, but rather by a force, a spirit or soul or mind, that is self-moving. Plenty of people still believe this, and to argue with them is entirely acceptable.
The compatibilist notion of free will is different - the concepts of freedom and volition both refer to concepts that have real, applicable uses. We can say that a person can do a thing "of their own free will," and we know what it means - we mean that they are not directly compelled by some other force, like extortion or threats or...hypnotic mind control. This is a philosophically, legally important notion, one that is eminently useful for both individuals and society.
It is also not in conflict with determinism, which is the crux of the matter. We simply include the forces that determine a person's "will", or rather the products of their forces, when we say the word "will," or even the word "self." It is not as though the referent of the term is nonexistent or illusory - merely that our understanding of it has changed in the context of an apparently deterministic reality. The key is now to distinguish between those forces which are part of the person and which forces are not - which leads to the legal and philosophical problems of mental illness and insanity pleas, compulsion, and even intent.
I think there could also be implications for the choices people made regarding their lives. If it became widely understood that one has no real choice when it comes to one's direction in life, and neither does anyone else, it might be that much more difficult to muster the subjective will required to attempt difficult subjective changes.
I'm guessing there must be controversy regarding compatibilism, at least in the Rational Choice thread. A compatibilist would have no difficulty with the Boxes problem.
Regardless of free will/determinism, humans are animals that react to pain and loss and the expectation of it. As such, the threat of punishment and punishment itself affect people no matter how free their will is.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
Yeah, I'm 100% on board the compatibilism train. Thanks for laying it out so clearly so early in the thread.
So, for the OP, what is the difference between a system which cannot be predicted even if every bit of information which it is possible to know about it is known and one which is not "determenistic".
In the wiki description of the problem, it points out that a first-person subjective perspective on the problem is necessary for it to appear paradoxical. A third-person observer simply notes that the prediction and choice were both caused by the chooser's state at the time of the prediction. The latter is more or less what I attempted to point out in that thread. There is no objective self-reference going on, unlike a case such as "this statement is false".
This says to me that the immensely strong subjective experience of free will is, in fact, exactly what causes that problem to be perceived as a paradox at all. It is no more physically impossible for there to be a perfect (or, if you like, "perfect enough") predictor of human choice than it is for there to be a perfect predictor of the trajectory of a ball down a slope. One is simply more complex than the other and thus more chaotic. The prediction is much more difficult, but no less possible.
This isn't accurate unless you posit that the laws of thermodynamics are wrong somehow. The entropy of a closed system cannot decrease, therefore moving from one thermodynamic state to a state of lesser entropy is (in a closed system) impossible. The energy budget of the universe appears to be fixed (which is to say that it is not being fed from some external reservoir) so the universe is, from a thermodynamic standpoint, a closed system. We might emulate time reversal on a limited scale by 'moving entropy out of the system' to allow it to evolve into a state identical to a previous state, but the universe as a whole can't do that and there is a limitation on how large of a subsection of the universe could possibly return to a prior state while using the rest of the universe as an entropy dump.
It isn't a universal potential driving thermodynamic evolution--it's a fundamental property of thermodynamic interactions.
It actually doesn't mean anything about future prediction. You can exactly simulate any system with a simulation apparatus, at minimum, the same size as the original system (a perfectly accurate simulation of the motion of a free electron, for instance, requires encoding a number of bits of information equivalent to the number of bits encoded by an electron...so the best way to simulate an electron is using an electron). If you can scale up the simulation apparatus sufficiently then you can observe simulated results faster than real-time, thereby predicting the future.
There's a limit to how large a system you can predict, again imposed by the energy budget of the universe. Obviously there are also certain technical hurdles.
You're right, though, in saying that it says nothing about whether or not the future is fixed. It's impossible to know, exactly, the state of the entire universe at any future point in time, but there is also no reason to believe that the future state is not explicitly a function of the current state.
Quantum mechanics is not indeterminant. It would play hell with our attempts to perfectly simulate a system since quantum uncertainty would prevent us from precisely positioning every particle in the system under simulation, but we could probably get close enough. Outside of certain very particular systems (lasers, Bose-Einstein condensates, and certain electrical circuits) quantum effects are entirely invisible at macroscopic scales thanks to renormalization.
Unless you think that superposed quantum states actually randomly collapse into discrete states upon observation (as opposed to becoming superposed states of an observer-observed system), the final state of a quantum system is entirely a function of its initial conditions, the same as a macroscopic system. The apparent 'randomness' of quantum behavior is entirely a limitation on our ability to discern it.
Yar will probably disagree. I think he's disagreed with me about it before, in fact. It's not the thread topic, though, so consider the QM portion of this response editorialization on my part based on a prevailing belief among physicists I've dealt with. The first part, though, about thermodynamics, is just what the laws of thermodynamics say. There aren't alternative interpretations to select between.
I guess that would constitute determinism, which would then include any and all choices made by human beings - whether they are coerced or not (if not, then out of free will according to the school of compatibilism as mentioned above)
This is one of the best descriptions of compatibilism I've seen in quite a while.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
It is not my responsibility to define "free will", as I don't claim that any such thing objectively exists. It exists subjectively in a way that we all experience, and likely all experience slightly differently, such that it is both unnecessary and impossible to pin it down firmly. You know how you can feel like you havent' made a decision regarding something, and then feel like you have? There you go. A definition of subjective free will is not necessary in any case, as it is not under dispute.
As for your system question, I don't think there is any difference. Are you proposing that a system of the former type exists? If so, is the predictability of the system limited only by inherent, irreducible randomness? If so, I have no objection to the notion that there is some unavoidable randomness in our universe. I just don't think that could build any objective support for anything like our subjective experience of free will.
I am saying that the universe, to the best of our knowledge, is a system that could not be predicted even if every bit of information which it is possible to know about it were known.
So me deciding to have pie tomorrow has already been determined to happen, I had no choice in the matter, whether I do or don't isn't the point, it's the point that no matter what I do, what happens is already known.
I forgot where I heard that but it seemed logical.
We call this "memory". When we do this for an event at time T1 and reconstruct it at time T2, we say we "remembered" the T1 event at T2.
Thermodynamics makes this kind of process easy if T1 is before T2 in time, and very hard if it is the other way around. We have a different name in the second case: "predicting". It is so energy-intensive to gather and operate on all of the necessary information to do this accurately that it is effectively impossible for events that are too complex and/or too far in the future.
That is what I meant.
Then we agree: the future is difficult to predict (though I think you are vastly simplifying the difficulty when giving an example of a single electron...what about even ten?), but this does not mean it is indeterminate.
I'll cut you off there, because I wasn't saying it was. I was pointing out that even if it were it wouldn't provide any real refuge from determinism. I was anticipating exactly the sort of argument you were.
It appears in this post that you are rejecting the Copenhagen Interpretation and then proposing a hidden variable hypothesis. My understanding is that the Copenhagen interpretation is still a commonly-adopted position among physicists, and hidden variable hypothesizes have been categorically debunked. Am I wrong in any of these understandings?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
So now it's not a question of whether determinism is a Thing but just whether the tiny, tiny subset of the universe that at any given time "matters" to humans can be predicted.
Very well, would you agree that the weather "matters" to humans in all kinds of ways? The weather is the perfect example of a system which is unpredictable even given perfect information. It is turbulent. Small changes, small enough for the uncertainty principle to come into play, rapidly grow into large changes. Ones which "matter" whatever the hell that means.
Are you now stating that the weather on Earth is a system that could not be predicted accurately even if every bit of information that was possible (or necessary) to know about it were known? How can you support that? On the basis that we can't do it with deeply, deeply imperfect information and knowledge? I don't think that follows.
I get it that you are bothered by the the scope limitation. I admit that I didn't absolutely specify in the OP that my interest was in human-scale questions, but I also don't think it was too hard to discern. In any case, I did not intend to start a debate on whether or not the universe in its entirety could be simulated, and I don't think that end up mattering for the debate I did intend to start. You can characterize this as some sort of change or dodge on my part if you like.
The uncertainty principle is not just some inconvenient side effect, it is absolutely fundamental to everything that is known about physics. There is a hard limit to how accurately you can measure the state of a system. And there are plenty of systems (eg: the weather) which "matter" to humans that depend on deviations in state smaller than it is physicially possible to measure even given "perfect" technology. Errors in measurement in a system like the weather add up fast over time to changes that actually matter in everyday human lives.
Where was all of this the last few times we did this thread?
Yes, this, exactly. I'm willing to take it even a step or two further, though. The non-compatabilist notions of free will are the problem, particularly the determinists' notion of free will.
Sure, there was the "spirit" notion of free will, which isn't exactly disproven but is less and less a part of how we view the world. It is being replaced in the minds of modern humans with the compatabilist notion of free will that is about interactions among civilized members of a society. I'd say that really we just know more now and have more detailed physical explanations of things, but the key elements here were always the same: it's not really about what goes on in a mind, but what goes on in society.
Somewhere along the way, though, this progression of ideas got misconstrued and off-track and a mutant concept was born, the strawman anti-concept of free will that determinists currently argue against. This concept does not seem to have ever gotten any sort of appropriate rational description or definition; it only exists in the form of determinist arguments against its existence. It seems to be imagined as some sort of vague causelessness, of total randomness, or otherwise just indeterminism. The very structure of the idea is so inconsistent and sloppy and meaningless that I am generally inclined to reject it outright. That is, I reject the entire argument against free will that comes from it as a meaningless mindfap.
Recursion mentioned something about a wiki comparing the third-party omniscient observer vs. the first-party particpant. IMAO (in my arrogant opinion), the third-party omniscient POV is where so much philosophy goes wrong. When it comes to reality, there is no third-party omniscient observer that we can consider within reason. We can only ever possibly be first-party participants in our universe. That will always be the relevant and only truth we can have. Any truth presented from a third-party omniscient perspective, such as "determinism" or "it's God's will," is fail from the get-go and can't be consistent with our puny human systems of logic.
I mean, seriously, prove determinism, m i rite? How could you?
P.S. Uncertainty Principle? Hell, this goes back to the Incompleteness Theorem. Knowledge, insofar as we are capable of conceiving of such a thing, is necessarily incomplete. To be complete, it would necessarily have to be self-contradictory.
When it comes to the quantum mechanics part, feel free to argue with what CptHamilton put in his spoilers.
I don't really have any interest in arguing this point. I guess you would say that since we will never be able to accurately predict something as complex as a human, that determinism is either false or not worth talking about.
That's correct, but if we want to have any kind of debate whatsoever, we need to pretend that it isn't. Scrap universal truth, and you scrap pretty much everything, including language.
It's inherently self destructive to reason.
One of the things about systems allowing free will is they allow things to be about something without being caused by it. They can be true, false, or indifferent.
Now, I could be reading this wrong, maybe you've got a new spin I never saw coming, but every variation on determinism I've seen says, from the start of the whole mess there's no other way it could go. Meaning, if something is "true" regarding outside reality it's a coincidental interaction of all the parts. Like an equation having the final solution appear inside. Neat, but it doesn't mean anything.
Which all doesn't change anything so far. I might not like it, but I don't like a lot of things. Doesn't change them. Doesn't change dealing with them.
The catch was, if that's true, there's no reasoning to prove determinism true. The whole chain of thoughts would go on just the same, evidence or no. Which means, if it's true, there's no reason to believe it's true. No such thing as a reason, just a cause.
Other way, you keep reason on the table. Things can be true or false, and dammit, there's stories. Other way, it's all just objects in space.
The catch is, I'd say the same stupid thing whether reality is improv or reading from a script. No way to tell. Just know which one I prefer.
Why I fear the ocean.
So compatibilism is good, and not only good, but has already infiltrated human discourse to the extent that it is common, uncontroversial knowledge. Thus anyone who talks about determinism is one of those self-absorbed "determinists" just engaging in mental masturbation, creating strawmen to beat up for their own amusement. Its not like anyone anywhere is engaging in arguments that assume, whether they realize it or not, that the human decision-making process transcends causality.
I agree that compatibilism is interesting, but I wonder where along the way you failed to notice that every one of these sane, rational compatibilists is also a determinist. After all, the reason it has its name is that it managed to define/explain "free will" in a manner that is compatible with determinism. No point being the one if you aren't also the other. Also no point being one if, as you suggest, there really is no coherent opposing argument with its own definition of "free will".
I note you have managed to blame the controversy on determinists who reject any non-compatibilist definition of "free will", rather than on the incompatibilists who put such definitions forward. That's a neat trick.
So...you're voting for solipsism then? No point talking about objective reality? That will certainly be news to these compatibilists you admire. Not to mention all the scientists who see asserting the existence of an consistent, objective, causal physical reality as something rather different than asserting God's Will. Drawing any equivalence between the two is another neat trick.
I'm not surprised to see you put it this way, though, as I've observed that your arguments often leave no separation between your subjective experience of physical reality and the physical reality itself.
In any case, you've inserted the unnecessary condition that the third party be omniscient. This is not necessary. To any third-party observer of the Boxes problem who knows the basic parameters of the situation, the box-filler is simply able to assess the chooser's state of mind accurately enough at prediction time to predict what their eventual choice will be with high reliability. Both the prediction and the choice are caused by the mental state. There is no self-reference, no breaking of causality, and no need for omniscience on anyone's part, least of all the observer. Not even perfect objectivity is required; indeed, the "third-party" observer could even be oneself before the whole thing starts. All it takes is an acknowledgement of a causal physical reality outside of ones own personal experience.
Clearly not as easily as one could assert an argument from ignorance. If you are referring to my use of "proven" in the OP, though, I did not intend it in a formal sense. I meant it in the sense that our understanding of the world and ability to predict it could take us to the point where it became very difficult to reasonably reject it.
Yes, yes, the set of all sets containing itself and all that. You've shown that you are aware of some high-falootin' theorems. Can we stop the intellectual phallus-waving at some point and deal with the more limited question of human decision-making? Are you saying that the Incompleteness Theorem shows that it will never be possible to predict what a person would do, even in a very time-limited and option-limited case of something like button pressing or box choosing? How could a volume the size of a human's head contain something so complex as to defy simulation within the resources of the remainder of the physical universe?
I've never met a physicist who accepts the Copenhagen Interpretation. Everett's Universal Wavefunction Interpretation is (in my experience) is the more commonly accepted interpretation among modern physicists. It doesn't involve hidden variables because it doesn't postulate that wavefunction collapse occurs at all. Instead of the observed wavefunction collapsing into one of the superposed states according to the Copenhagen black-box or a hidden variable operation, the wavefunction of the observed system becomes coupled to the state of the observer. Rather than having state (spin-up + spin-down) -> (spin-up OR spin-down), you have (observer-spin-up + observer-spin-down). It's commonly known as the many-world interpretation because there are "worlds" where the observer sees one state or the other, and both exist. They aren't actually different worlds--they're superposed states in the same universe. The sum of all superposed states of the universe is the eponymous universal wave function.
Edit: According to wikipedia, polling data shows Copenhagen as the most popular interpretation followed by Everett. I think I addressed this before on this forum at some point, but I suspect that the poll sampled heavily from people who don't actually care about quantum mechanics. I'd say that roughly half of my required graduate QM class never wrapped their heads around the universal wavefunction concept. On the other hand, none of my professors and none of my classmates in non-required quantum field theory lectures accepted Copenhagen. Stephen Hawking subscribes to Everett, and that's good enough for me.
@RiemannLives
I don't see how the uncertainty relation implies non-deterministic behavior. Quantum field excitations have probabilistic distributions of their properties. You can't constrain properties related by non-commutative operators with infinite precision, but you can still talk about the properties using distributions. The evolution of the field excitation under operations will yield new distributions in entirely deterministic ways.
If determinism is true, we can't know anything about the future. We can't know anything. "Know" is a meaningless concept. There is no such thing as a concept. We can't learn about the future because we can't learn - 'learning' is not a thing a deterministic world allows for. In a deterministic universe, 'person' is shorn of meaning - all the possible ways to describe an individual thing, aside from recitations of its observed behavior patterns, are false. Motivation, understanding, belief, creativity... all false.
I suppose my problem with Compatibilist theory is that it doesn't offer any reason to strive toward better moral and ethical behavior.
That's a hell of a bunch of bold statements about the failings determinism. Why can't we know anything? Why is "know" a meaningless concept? Why is there no such thing as a "concept"?
This is enlightening. Thank you.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Does a lightning bolt know anything? How about a cloud?
Why not?
In a perfectly determanistic universe, the same answer applies to humans.
We are free to make choices and to act of our own instinct and self, but those choices are ultimately decided by previous choices and circumstances, which are ultimately decided by previous choices and circumstance and so on. To the point where the choices themselves do not represent any actual "free will" because they are simply a result of past events and decisions. Which would make it deterministic.
Is there a solid argument against this? What would it be? We would have to determine that given the exact same past events and stimuli, and the exact same current events and stimuli, that the same person may make multiple choices. But why would this occur? Why, if everything leading up to a decision was absolutely the same, would I ever make a different choice? What would possibly cause that?
If there isn't any way I would make a different choice, then things are deterministic. Despite the fact that I am both free to do whatever I want, and have the will to do it. in the end, I will always make the same decision which is determined by the past.
Can someone clarify for me?
But basically, yes, your interest in the subject which is derived from many past experiences plus your genetic make up (which were all a consequence of previous "decisions" aka your parents banging) as well as your current mood and availability (again, all a consequence of other "decisions") led you to feel like posting a response, so you did.
So if every decision can be broken down to a result of past decisions, then those previous decisions can be as well. And there is never any room for any alternative paths or decisions. This was bound to happen, there is no opportunity to derive from that.
At least, logically, I can not see one. I am more then open to there being a flaw in my thought process. But where I stand now, I don't see one.
I'm going to go ahead and assume that there's a significant overlap between people who believe in the romanticized notion of "free will" (usually in a sense that has spiritual significance) and that criminals should be punished - even if it doesn't work as a good deterrent or increase the safety of the rest of the population.
Of course you made the comment by will. The most cogent compatibilist account of determinism says that will exists - obviously, because the word is clearly referring to an extant concept or event, otherwise we wouldn't have the word - but it's completely part of the physical universe and subject to the mechanisms of causality, as far as we know.
You made your comment because you had the desire to do so, and that desire is the product of a confluence of innumerable, mind-bogglingly complex forces. Even aside from the hard physicalist level (particles bumping into each other), your desires have arisen from a series of previous events - biological proclivity, education and experience, values absorbed from your parents, your peers, your culture and its media.
Decision-making exists, but decisions are not events without cause. They have causes, and those causes themselves have causes.
How could it be otherwise? What other form could "will" take? If we are to imagine a will that is "free" in the sense that it is not determined by causes, what would be the nature of such a will? Where would desires and volition come from, and why would we have them? I have yet to hear a coherent account of how a decision could be made by a will that is "free" from determinism. How could such an event occur?
The idea that determinism would annihilate personhood and the validity or existence of volition or decision is quite simply a misunderstanding of the concept of determinism. There is no logical connection between the two; it is generally a knee-jerk reaction (an understandable one) from those who generally hold that a person is not a determined entity.
I hold the opposite view - the view that an undetermined entity could not be a person. If such an entity were to make decisions "free from cause," it would make decisions apart from its personality, from its beliefs, from its needs or desires, and would behave in a bizarre, random or incoherent fashion. Or it would be catatonic.