Even if the universe is purely mundane, we don't know the future. We cannot build a computer complex enough to predict the universe within the universe itself. Its like trying to solve the halting problem when the program being tested is a human brain.
The supernatural is not required for unpredictability.
I'm not arguing strictly for the supernatural.
I'm arguing there is an unknowable core that we call free will because there's a big fuckin gap no one can really successfully fill. Call it quantum uncertainty, or whatever the fuck you like. There's an unknown in there that can't be summarily erased or disregarded.
That is the same as arguing for the supernatural. Like, the word "supernatural" is exactly the word we use for what you are describing - unknowable things that cannot be tested for in the natural world.
There's no way to truly test your hypothesis in the natural world it is as much a supernatural argument as mine.
That is because we're talking about whether the supernatural phenomenon of free will is necessary for meaning and morality in human life.
Well then yeah, if we're agreed the gap is there and that determinism is as supernatural an explanation as a soul then yeah I'd say pretty definitely.
Cause if we are little more than hyper complex dominoes there's no good reason to care about anyone, even ourselves. That we do care is irrelevant because that is just a complex and similarly irrelevant dominoe display.
Like i said any moral framework has to ignore the end point determinism comes to because at the end of determinism we can kneel someone down blow their brains out, and what? That was always going to happen, no sense crying over the rocks the universe broke.
We are hyper complex domines, and there is a reason to care.
That reason? I don't like pain.
No, seriously, that's enough of a reason for fuck ton of shit, large parts of human society have been built on continued existence of an individual as something that is not in agony (be it due hunger, tigers or stab wounds), even if only because individuals in agony are generally (exceptions exist) not very productive towards continued existence of the community in general, or its rulers in specific.
If you don't like pain I got a seemingly permanent solution to the problem. It might hurt a bit to start but then you probably won't feel pain ever again. I mean you won't feel anything else, but no more pain either.
Even if the universe is purely mundane, we don't know the future. We cannot build a computer complex enough to predict the universe within the universe itself. Its like trying to solve the halting problem when the program being tested is a human brain.
The supernatural is not required for unpredictability.
I'm not arguing strictly for the supernatural.
I'm arguing there is an unknowable core that we call free will because there's a big fuckin gap no one can really successfully fill. Call it quantum uncertainty, or whatever the fuck you like. There's an unknown in there that can't be summarily erased or disregarded.
That is the same as arguing for the supernatural. Like, the word "supernatural" is exactly the word we use for what you are describing - unknowable things that cannot be tested for in the natural world.
There's no way to truly test your hypothesis in the natural world it is as much a supernatural argument as mine.
That is because we're talking about whether the supernatural phenomenon of free will is necessary for meaning and morality in human life.
Well then yeah, if we're agreed the gap is there and that determinism is as supernatural an explanation as a soul then yeah I'd say pretty definitely.
Cause if we are little more than hyper complex dominoes there's no good reason to care about anyone, even ourselves. That we do care is irrelevant because that is just a complex and similarly irrelevant dominoe display.
Like i said any moral framework has to ignore the end point determinism comes to because at the end of determinism we can kneel someone down blow their brains out, and what? That was always going to happen, no sense crying over the eggs the universe broke.
Consider humanity as it is now. We exist as creatures of moral societies, regardless of whether determinism hold or not, regardless of whether we have free will. We always maintain some sort of morality, no matter how base we are. Even the worst gangbanger looks out for his brother in arms.
We have sociopaths.
If the only reason for morality is because of the societal consequences we built I'll point out all of those moral frameworks were built on the idea of free will existing.
We had societies before we had the concept of free will. We have fundamental natural inclinations to righteousness and fairness, and for retribution towards wrongdoers.
I think that the concept of 'free will' is fundamental to the existence of all societies, human or animal. Sure, a deer might not be able to explain to you that it believes it has free will, but I think that a deer goes through life making real, unpredictable choices informed by its history. Will it dodge the car left, or right? Will it eat some grass, or go look for some leaves on a bush? Here comes a wolf, should it run with the herd, or strike out alone? What it does is informed by its past, but it is never UTTERLY predictable in its action. Sure, we can set up situations where one decision is so obviously awful that the deer will never make it (Should I leap into this lava pit, or go over there and eat those fresh blades of grass at a safe distance) but that doesn't mean the deer isn't making decisions.
Even if the universe is purely mundane, we don't know the future. We cannot build a computer complex enough to predict the universe within the universe itself. Its like trying to solve the halting problem when the program being tested is a human brain.
The supernatural is not required for unpredictability.
I'm not arguing strictly for the supernatural.
I'm arguing there is an unknowable core that we call free will because there's a big fuckin gap no one can really successfully fill. Call it quantum uncertainty, or whatever the fuck you like. There's an unknown in there that can't be summarily erased or disregarded.
That is the same as arguing for the supernatural. Like, the word "supernatural" is exactly the word we use for what you are describing - unknowable things that cannot be tested for in the natural world.
There's no way to truly test your hypothesis in the natural world it is as much a supernatural argument as mine.
That is because we're talking about whether the supernatural phenomenon of free will is necessary for meaning and morality in human life.
Well then yeah, if we're agreed the gap is there and that determinism is as supernatural an explanation as a soul then yeah I'd say pretty definitely.
Cause if we are little more than hyper complex dominoes there's no good reason to care about anyone, even ourselves. That we do care is irrelevant because that is just a complex and similarly irrelevant dominoe display.
Like i said any moral framework has to ignore the end point determinism comes to because at the end of determinism we can kneel someone down blow their brains out, and what? That was always going to happen, no sense crying over the eggs the universe broke.
Consider humanity as it is now. We exist as creatures of moral societies, regardless of whether determinism hold or not, regardless of whether we have free will. We always maintain some sort of morality, no matter how base we are. Even the worst gangbanger looks out for his brother in arms.
We have sociopaths.
If the only reason for morality is because of the societal consequences we built I'll point out all of those moral frameworks were built on the idea of free will existing.
We had societies before we had the concept of free will. We have fundamental natural inclinations to righteousness and fairness, and for retribution towards wrongdoers.
I think that the concept of 'free will' is fundamental to the existence of all societies, human or animal. Sure, a deer might not be able to explain to you that it believes it has free will, but I think that a deer goes through life making real, unpredictable choices informed by its history. Will it dodge the car left, or right? Will it eat some grass, or go look for some leaves on a bush? Here comes a wolf, should it run with the herd, or strike out alone? What it does is informed by its past, but it is never UTTERLY predictable in its action. Sure, we can set up situations where one decision is so obviously awful that the deer will never make it (Should I leap into this lava pit, or go over there and eat those fresh blades of grass at a safe distance) but that doesn't mean the deer isn't making decisions.
I don't think non-determinism implies the existence of free will, and I don't really agree with your interpretation of quantum mechanics as it applies to macro-systems above the quantum level.
Above the level of quantum mechanics, things appear to happen deterministically. A ball will always bounce off a hard wall, no matter how many times I throw it.
Jephery on
}
"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!".
Even if the universe is purely mundane, we don't know the future. We cannot build a computer complex enough to predict the universe within the universe itself. Its like trying to solve the halting problem when the program being tested is a human brain.
The supernatural is not required for unpredictability.
I'm not arguing strictly for the supernatural.
I'm arguing there is an unknowable core that we call free will because there's a big fuckin gap no one can really successfully fill. Call it quantum uncertainty, or whatever the fuck you like. There's an unknown in there that can't be summarily erased or disregarded.
That is the same as arguing for the supernatural. Like, the word "supernatural" is exactly the word we use for what you are describing - unknowable things that cannot be tested for in the natural world.
There's no way to truly test your hypothesis in the natural world it is as much a supernatural argument as mine.
That is because we're talking about whether the supernatural phenomenon of free will is necessary for meaning and morality in human life.
Well then yeah, if we're agreed the gap is there and that determinism is as supernatural an explanation as a soul then yeah I'd say pretty definitely.
Cause if we are little more than hyper complex dominoes there's no good reason to care about anyone, even ourselves. That we do care is irrelevant because that is just a complex and similarly irrelevant dominoe display.
Like i said any moral framework has to ignore the end point determinism comes to because at the end of determinism we can kneel someone down blow their brains out, and what? That was always going to happen, no sense crying over the eggs the universe broke.
Consider humanity as it is now. We exist as creatures of moral societies, regardless of whether determinism hold or not, regardless of whether we have free will. We always maintain some sort of morality, no matter how base we are. Even the worst gangbanger looks out for his brother in arms.
We have sociopaths.
If the only reason for morality is because of the societal consequences we built I'll point out most if not all of those moral frameworks were built on the idea of free will existing.
I could just wipe all those societies off the map and continue to not care. Again no sense crying over rocks the universe broke.
Free will adds nothing to any of this except now everything you think and do is 100% your own fault even if you have a brain tumor, veins full of drugs, and a horrible past.
Even if the universe is purely mundane, we don't know the future. We cannot build a computer complex enough to predict the universe within the universe itself. Its like trying to solve the halting problem when the program being tested is a human brain.
The supernatural is not required for unpredictability.
I'm not arguing strictly for the supernatural.
I'm arguing there is an unknowable core that we call free will because there's a big fuckin gap no one can really successfully fill. Call it quantum uncertainty, or whatever the fuck you like. There's an unknown in there that can't be summarily erased or disregarded.
That is the same as arguing for the supernatural. Like, the word "supernatural" is exactly the word we use for what you are describing - unknowable things that cannot be tested for in the natural world.
There's no way to truly test your hypothesis in the natural world it is as much a supernatural argument as mine.
That is because we're talking about whether the supernatural phenomenon of free will is necessary for meaning and morality in human life.
Well then yeah, if we're agreed the gap is there and that determinism is as supernatural an explanation as a soul then yeah I'd say pretty definitely.
Cause if we are little more than hyper complex dominoes there's no good reason to care about anyone, even ourselves. That we do care is irrelevant because that is just a complex and similarly irrelevant dominoe display.
Like i said any moral framework has to ignore the end point determinism comes to because at the end of determinism we can kneel someone down blow their brains out, and what? That was always going to happen, no sense crying over the eggs the universe broke.
Consider humanity as it is now. We exist as creatures of moral societies, regardless of whether determinism hold or not, regardless of whether we have free will. We always maintain some sort of morality, no matter how base we are. Even the worst gangbanger looks out for his brother in arms.
We have sociopaths.
If the only reason for morality is because of the societal consequences we built I'll point out all of those moral frameworks were built on the idea of free will existing.
We had societies before we had the concept of free will. We have fundamental natural inclinations to righteousness and fairness, and for retribution towards wrongdoers.
I think that the concept of 'free will' is fundamental to the existence of all societies, human or animal. Sure, a deer might not be able to explain to you that it believes it has free will, but I think that a deer goes through life making real, unpredictable choices informed by its history. Will it dodge the car left, or right? Will it eat some grass, or go look for some leaves on a bush? Here comes a wolf, should it run with the herd, or strike out alone? What it does is informed by its past, but it is never UTTERLY predictable in its action. Sure, we can set up situations where one decision is so obviously awful that the deer will never make it (Should I leap into this lava pit, or go over there and eat those fresh blades of grass at a safe distance) but that doesn't mean the deer isn't making decisions.
I don't think non-determinism implies the existence of free will, and I don't really agree with your interpretation of quantum mechanics as it applies to macro-systems above the quantum level.
Above the level of quantum mechanics, things happen deterministically. A ball will always bounce off a hard wall, no matter how many times I throw it.
This is like provably false. Eventually the ball will work it's way through the wall, and as you keep throwing you definitely won't be able to predict the exact bounce back.
Like there's a reason we still cheer in the control room when a rocket makes it off the planet, because there's so many factors at play that even if we did all the newtonian math right the thing might just fail and explode because the results aren't absolutely predictable.
I'm done, i have no qualifications to deal with someones existential crisis or to explain the intricasies of the brain.
And i definitely don't have the patience to run around in circles for another 20 pages or however long it takes.
Have fun you all, i'm out.
Even if the universe is purely mundane, we don't know the future. We cannot build a computer complex enough to predict the universe within the universe itself. Its like trying to solve the halting problem when the program being tested is a human brain.
The supernatural is not required for unpredictability.
I'm not arguing strictly for the supernatural.
I'm arguing there is an unknowable core that we call free will because there's a big fuckin gap no one can really successfully fill. Call it quantum uncertainty, or whatever the fuck you like. There's an unknown in there that can't be summarily erased or disregarded.
That is the same as arguing for the supernatural. Like, the word "supernatural" is exactly the word we use for what you are describing - unknowable things that cannot be tested for in the natural world.
There's no way to truly test your hypothesis in the natural world it is as much a supernatural argument as mine.
That is because we're talking about whether the supernatural phenomenon of free will is necessary for meaning and morality in human life.
Well then yeah, if we're agreed the gap is there and that determinism is as supernatural an explanation as a soul then yeah I'd say pretty definitely.
Cause if we are little more than hyper complex dominoes there's no good reason to care about anyone, even ourselves. That we do care is irrelevant because that is just a complex and similarly irrelevant dominoe display.
Like i said any moral framework has to ignore the end point determinism comes to because at the end of determinism we can kneel someone down blow their brains out, and what? That was always going to happen, no sense crying over the eggs the universe broke.
Consider humanity as it is now. We exist as creatures of moral societies, regardless of whether determinism hold or not, regardless of whether we have free will. We always maintain some sort of morality, no matter how base we are. Even the worst gangbanger looks out for his brother in arms.
We have sociopaths.
If the only reason for morality is because of the societal consequences we built I'll point out all of those moral frameworks were built on the idea of free will existing.
We had societies before we had the concept of free will. We have fundamental natural inclinations to righteousness and fairness, and for retribution towards wrongdoers.
I think that the concept of 'free will' is fundamental to the existence of all societies, human or animal. Sure, a deer might not be able to explain to you that it believes it has free will, but I think that a deer goes through life making real, unpredictable choices informed by its history. Will it dodge the car left, or right? Will it eat some grass, or go look for some leaves on a bush? Here comes a wolf, should it run with the herd, or strike out alone? What it does is informed by its past, but it is never UTTERLY predictable in its action. Sure, we can set up situations where one decision is so obviously awful that the deer will never make it (Should I leap into this lava pit, or go over there and eat those fresh blades of grass at a safe distance) but that doesn't mean the deer isn't making decisions.
I don't think non-determinism implies the existence of free will, and I don't really agree with your interpretation of quantum mechanics as it applies to macro-systems above the quantum level.
Above the level of quantum mechanics, things happen deterministically. A ball will always bounce off a hard wall, no matter how many times I throw it.
This is like provably false. Eventually the ball will work it's way through the wall, and as you keep throwing you definitely won't be able to predict the exact bounce back.
Like there's a reason we still cheer in the control room when a rocket makes it off the planet, because there's so many factors at play that even if we did all the newtonian math right the thing might just fail and explode because the results aren't absolutely predictable.
Ok but none of that involves quantum nondeterminism, just that things aren't always consistent because there are an insane number of factors at play, which holds even in a deterministic universe.
I'm saying that there is no way for the ball to quantum tunnel through the wall like an electron may quantum tunnel out of a transistor.
Jephery on
}
"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!".
+2
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JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
Cause if we are little more than hyper complex dominoes there's no good reason to care about anyone, even ourselves.
.
The joke is that there is no reason to care even if that were not true. People have repeatedly pointed out that the existence of "free will" is not enough to save meaning.
Even if the universe is purely mundane, we don't know the future. We cannot build a computer complex enough to predict the universe within the universe itself. Its like trying to solve the halting problem when the program being tested is a human brain.
The supernatural is not required for unpredictability.
I'm not arguing strictly for the supernatural.
I'm arguing there is an unknowable core that we call free will because there's a big fuckin gap no one can really successfully fill. Call it quantum uncertainty, or whatever the fuck you like. There's an unknown in there that can't be summarily erased or disregarded.
That is the same as arguing for the supernatural. Like, the word "supernatural" is exactly the word we use for what you are describing - unknowable things that cannot be tested for in the natural world.
There's no way to truly test your hypothesis in the natural world it is as much a supernatural argument as mine.
That is because we're talking about whether the supernatural phenomenon of free will is necessary for meaning and morality in human life.
Well then yeah, if we're agreed the gap is there and that determinism is as supernatural an explanation as a soul then yeah I'd say pretty definitely.
Cause if we are little more than hyper complex dominoes there's no good reason to care about anyone, even ourselves. That we do care is irrelevant because that is just a complex and similarly irrelevant dominoe display.
Like i said any moral framework has to ignore the end point determinism comes to because at the end of determinism we can kneel someone down blow their brains out, and what? That was always going to happen, no sense crying over the eggs the universe broke.
Consider humanity as it is now. We exist as creatures of moral societies, regardless of whether determinism hold or not, regardless of whether we have free will. We always maintain some sort of morality, no matter how base we are. Even the worst gangbanger looks out for his brother in arms.
We have sociopaths.
If the only reason for morality is because of the societal consequences we built I'll point out most if not all of those moral frameworks were built on the idea of free will existing.
I could just wipe all those societies off the map and continue to not care. Again no sense crying over rocks the universe broke.
Free will adds nothing to any of this except now everything you think and do is 100% your own fault even if you have a brain tumor, veins full of drugs, and a horrible past.
Free will is just guilt and ego mythologized.
Free will does not rule out casualty playing a role, it rules out causality being 100% responsible.
I know of few morality scales where "i was drunk" is an acceptable explanation for all behaviors.
All moral scales assign fault for action to the being carrying them out. Many make space for causal forces beyond our control. A tumor affecting decision making adversely, a horrible past affecting your decision making, the context and immediate causal forces at play in the action being reviewed morally. These are all parts of morality scales that include free will conceptually. Like extenuating circumstances is a thing we acknowledge morally.
Cause if we are little more than hyper complex dominoes there's no good reason to care about anyone, even ourselves.
.
The joke is that there is no reason to care even if that were not true. People have repeatedly pointed out that the existence of "free will" is not enough to save meaning.
Actually it is.
Sure in the vastness of existence we are insignificant dust with little true meaning. However we can take meaning of our own amongst ourselves and that's enough to justify caring about the dust at least a little bit.
If it's all super complex dominoes. I can't even take meaning and enforce it. Any meaning, or a distinct lack of it, is forced upon us.
Even if the universe is purely mundane, we don't know the future. We cannot build a computer complex enough to predict the universe within the universe itself. Its like trying to solve the halting problem when the program being tested is a human brain.
The supernatural is not required for unpredictability.
I'm not arguing strictly for the supernatural.
I'm arguing there is an unknowable core that we call free will because there's a big fuckin gap no one can really successfully fill. Call it quantum uncertainty, or whatever the fuck you like. There's an unknown in there that can't be summarily erased or disregarded.
That is the same as arguing for the supernatural. Like, the word "supernatural" is exactly the word we use for what you are describing - unknowable things that cannot be tested for in the natural world.
There's no way to truly test your hypothesis in the natural world it is as much a supernatural argument as mine.
That is because we're talking about whether the supernatural phenomenon of free will is necessary for meaning and morality in human life.
Well then yeah, if we're agreed the gap is there and that determinism is as supernatural an explanation as a soul then yeah I'd say pretty definitely.
Cause if we are little more than hyper complex dominoes there's no good reason to care about anyone, even ourselves. That we do care is irrelevant because that is just a complex and similarly irrelevant dominoe display.
Like i said any moral framework has to ignore the end point determinism comes to because at the end of determinism we can kneel someone down blow their brains out, and what? That was always going to happen, no sense crying over the eggs the universe broke.
Consider humanity as it is now. We exist as creatures of moral societies, regardless of whether determinism hold or not, regardless of whether we have free will. We always maintain some sort of morality, no matter how base we are. Even the worst gangbanger looks out for his brother in arms.
We have sociopaths.
If the only reason for morality is because of the societal consequences we built I'll point out all of those moral frameworks were built on the idea of free will existing.
We had societies before we had the concept of free will. We have fundamental natural inclinations to righteousness and fairness, and for retribution towards wrongdoers.
I think that the concept of 'free will' is fundamental to the existence of all societies, human or animal. Sure, a deer might not be able to explain to you that it believes it has free will, but I think that a deer goes through life making real, unpredictable choices informed by its history. Will it dodge the car left, or right? Will it eat some grass, or go look for some leaves on a bush? Here comes a wolf, should it run with the herd, or strike out alone? What it does is informed by its past, but it is never UTTERLY predictable in its action. Sure, we can set up situations where one decision is so obviously awful that the deer will never make it (Should I leap into this lava pit, or go over there and eat those fresh blades of grass at a safe distance) but that doesn't mean the deer isn't making decisions.
I don't think non-determinism implies the existence of free will, and I don't really agree with your interpretation of quantum mechanics as it applies to macro-systems above the quantum level.
Above the level of quantum mechanics, things happen deterministically. A ball will always bounce off a hard wall, no matter how many times I throw it.
This is like provably false. Eventually the ball will work it's way through the wall, and as you keep throwing you definitely won't be able to predict the exact bounce back.
Like there's a reason we still cheer in the control room when a rocket makes it off the planet, because there's so many factors at play that even if we did all the newtonian math right the thing might just fail and explode because the results aren't absolutely predictable.
Ok but none of that involves quantum nondeterminism, just that things aren't always consistent because there are an insane number of factors at play, which holds even in a deterministic universe.
I'm saying that there is no way for the ball to quantum tunnel through the wall like an electron may quantum tunnel out of a transistor.
Yes that insane number of factors we can just barely fathom, can't measure until after it has resolved, and definitely can't predict... yeah that's as supernatural a space as free will or the soul. What's it matter what you call that space?
Even if the universe is purely mundane, we don't know the future. We cannot build a computer complex enough to predict the universe within the universe itself. Its like trying to solve the halting problem when the program being tested is a human brain.
The supernatural is not required for unpredictability.
I'm not arguing strictly for the supernatural.
I'm arguing there is an unknowable core that we call free will because there's a big fuckin gap no one can really successfully fill. Call it quantum uncertainty, or whatever the fuck you like. There's an unknown in there that can't be summarily erased or disregarded.
That is the same as arguing for the supernatural. Like, the word "supernatural" is exactly the word we use for what you are describing - unknowable things that cannot be tested for in the natural world.
There's no way to truly test your hypothesis in the natural world it is as much a supernatural argument as mine.
That is because we're talking about whether the supernatural phenomenon of free will is necessary for meaning and morality in human life.
Well then yeah, if we're agreed the gap is there and that determinism is as supernatural an explanation as a soul then yeah I'd say pretty definitely.
Cause if we are little more than hyper complex dominoes there's no good reason to care about anyone, even ourselves. That we do care is irrelevant because that is just a complex and similarly irrelevant dominoe display.
Like i said any moral framework has to ignore the end point determinism comes to because at the end of determinism we can kneel someone down blow their brains out, and what? That was always going to happen, no sense crying over the eggs the universe broke.
Consider humanity as it is now. We exist as creatures of moral societies, regardless of whether determinism hold or not, regardless of whether we have free will. We always maintain some sort of morality, no matter how base we are. Even the worst gangbanger looks out for his brother in arms.
We have sociopaths.
If the only reason for morality is because of the societal consequences we built I'll point out all of those moral frameworks were built on the idea of free will existing.
We had societies before we had the concept of free will. We have fundamental natural inclinations to righteousness and fairness, and for retribution towards wrongdoers.
I think that the concept of 'free will' is fundamental to the existence of all societies, human or animal. Sure, a deer might not be able to explain to you that it believes it has free will, but I think that a deer goes through life making real, unpredictable choices informed by its history. Will it dodge the car left, or right? Will it eat some grass, or go look for some leaves on a bush? Here comes a wolf, should it run with the herd, or strike out alone? What it does is informed by its past, but it is never UTTERLY predictable in its action. Sure, we can set up situations where one decision is so obviously awful that the deer will never make it (Should I leap into this lava pit, or go over there and eat those fresh blades of grass at a safe distance) but that doesn't mean the deer isn't making decisions.
I don't think non-determinism implies the existence of free will, and I don't really agree with your interpretation of quantum mechanics as it applies to macro-systems above the quantum level.
Above the level of quantum mechanics, things happen deterministically. A ball will always bounce off a hard wall, no matter how many times I throw it.
No, it will not. Do it enough times, and even by your standards you will eventually be wrong. Sometimes that ball will just pass straight through that wall without interacting with it. Swoosh. Now, you might need to throw that ball at the wall continuously for a trillion times the possible age of the universe for that to happen, but it WILL happen eventually. Does this seem counter-intuitive and impossible? Congratulations! Welcome to our quantum universe.
More realistically in your ball example, do you believe the ball will come off the wall with the EXACT same trajectory every time? With the EXACT same angular momentum? Because it absolutely will not, even if you throw it at the same point on the wall. The wall and the ball both have varying roughness, rigidity and toughness down to the atomic level on their surfaces. Those properties all CHANGE continuously in their exact values as the surface of the ball and wall continuously warp and shift. The ball might come off that wall with a slightly different angular momentum, or at a slightly different velocity vector. This might then cause you to drop the ball when you wouldn't before.
To make it easier to understand. Imagine that instead of throwing a ball at a wall, you are firing a proton at the wall. You cannot predict, regardless of how accurately you aim or target that proton, the EXACT angle that its going to come off at. When you fire that single proton, maybe it will go right through, or MAYBE it will bounce back, hit you in a neuron in the brain and cause that neuron to die which will slightly change the 'recollection strength' of the memories that neuron had. And suddenly YOU (A macroscopic object) are making a different decision because of the interaction between a proton and a virtual proton. Or even the interaction between a proton and a W boson if you fire that particle with enough speed.
Or, for a more realistic example. Imagine you are standing outside minding your own business. Oh no! Here comes a neutrino from space! Its a 100 PeV neutrino, so the flux of them is very low even on long timescales. You've probably only had a few hundred of them pass through you in your lifespan without interacting. Here it comes.... OH SHIT! It just randomly hit you! And oh no, it got you RIGHT IN THE DNA in a cell in your brain, and at an exact point which is bad for your cancer repair cells. Now you have cancer. And you have cancer thanks to quantum mechanics governing interactions between neutrinos and other particles. It could have hit you anywhere, it could have missed you completely. In fact, billions of years ago, it could have literally gone a different way. In double fact, because no-one measured it (or possibly could have, because no-one knew it was there) until it hit you and deposited its energy and it passed between two stars a few hundred light years ago, it wasn't even 100% on course to hit you until it did, it existed as a probability distribution hundreds of light years across and only became 'single valued' for a very brief time when it hit you.
These sort of interactions can modify crystal growth patterns and cloud formation and all sorts of things all the time, and they are always truly random. Perhaps it rains a few seconds later and a deer goes a different way around a tree and hits your car. Perhaps the crystal grain formations in a steel blade take a different shape, and a sword shatters when it hits a shield 10 years later along the exact grain pattern which wouldn't have been there
The universe is STRICTLY non deterministic. It is not deterministic at any level, for any object, at any time. It is only deterministic for sufficiently large objects at sufficiently short times being described in sufficiently simple ways. "Exactly what will Jephery be thinking about in 7562 seconds?" is not sufficiently large, or sufficiently short, or sufficiently simple. It is chaotic, and the answer to that question being chaotic makes humans chaotic.
The universe is no more deterministic that it is made up of a turtle flying through space with the world on its back. It is no more deterministic than the stars are just holes in the sky that the light shines through.
"That is cool" - Abraham Lincoln
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JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
Cause if we are little more than hyper complex dominoes there's no good reason to care about anyone, even ourselves.
.
The joke is that there is no reason to care even if that were not true. People have repeatedly pointed out that the existence of "free will" is not enough to save meaning.
Actually it is.
Sure in the vastness of existence we are insignificant dust with little true meaning. However we can take meaning of our own amongst ourselves and that's enough to justify caring about the dust at least a little bit.
If it's all super complex dominoes. I can't even take meaning and enforce it. Any meaning, or a distinct lack of it, is forced upon us.
You can't take meaning and enforce it, because that is not a thing that makes sense. We assign meaning. And we don't need free will to do it.
what does meaning being forced upon us even mean, and why is that the case of we lack "free will"? (You have yet to give a comprehensive definition of "free will" btw. It is still super unclear what it is you think we should be having here.)
Cause if we are little more than hyper complex dominoes there's no good reason to care about anyone, even ourselves.
.
The joke is that there is no reason to care even if that were not true. People have repeatedly pointed out that the existence of "free will" is not enough to save meaning.
Actually it is.
Sure in the vastness of existence we are insignificant dust with little true meaning. However we can take meaning of our own amongst ourselves and that's enough to justify caring about the dust at least a little bit.
If it's all super complex dominoes. I can't even take meaning and enforce it. Any meaning, or a distinct lack of it, is forced upon us.
You can't take meaning and enforce it, because that is not a thing that makes sense. We assign meaning. And we don't need free will to do it.
what does meaning being forced upon us even mean, and why is that the case of we lack "free will"? (You have yet to give a comprehensive definition of "free will" btw. It is still super unclear what it is you think we should be having here.)
There is no true meaning
The only meaning that exists is the subjective meaning we experience
We do not choose that meaning because the meaning is the result of an entirely deterministic environment. Any meaning we experience is forced upon us.
Yes we assign meaning as part of the deterministic process, but again that assignment is forced upon us.
Sleep on
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JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
Cause if we are little more than hyper complex dominoes there's no good reason to care about anyone, even ourselves.
.
The joke is that there is no reason to care even if that were not true. People have repeatedly pointed out that the existence of "free will" is not enough to save meaning.
Actually it is.
Sure in the vastness of existence we are insignificant dust with little true meaning. However we can take meaning of our own amongst ourselves and that's enough to justify caring about the dust at least a little bit.
If it's all super complex dominoes. I can't even take meaning and enforce it. Any meaning, or a distinct lack of it, is forced upon us.
You can't take meaning and enforce it, because that is not a thing that makes sense. We assign meaning. And we don't need free will to do it.
what does meaning being forced upon us even mean, and why is that the case of we lack "free will"? (You have yet to give a comprehensive definition of "free will" btw. It is still super unclear what it is you think we should be having here.)
There is no true meaning
The only meaning that exists is the subjective meaning we experience
We do not choose that meaning because the meaning is the result of an entirely deterministic environment. Any meaning we experience is forced upon us.
ok what is meaning though? why is it relevant whether determinism is true?
Cause if we are little more than hyper complex dominoes there's no good reason to care about anyone, even ourselves.
.
The joke is that there is no reason to care even if that were not true. People have repeatedly pointed out that the existence of "free will" is not enough to save meaning.
Actually it is.
Sure in the vastness of existence we are insignificant dust with little true meaning. However we can take meaning of our own amongst ourselves and that's enough to justify caring about the dust at least a little bit.
If it's all super complex dominoes. I can't even take meaning and enforce it. Any meaning, or a distinct lack of it, is forced upon us.
You can't take meaning and enforce it, because that is not a thing that makes sense. We assign meaning. And we don't need free will to do it.
what does meaning being forced upon us even mean, and why is that the case of we lack "free will"? (You have yet to give a comprehensive definition of "free will" btw. It is still super unclear what it is you think we should be having here.)
There is no true meaning
The only meaning that exists is the subjective meaning we experience
We do not choose that meaning because the meaning is the result of an entirely deterministic environment. Any meaning we experience is forced upon us.
Yes we assign meaning as part of the deterministic process, but again that assignment is forced upon us.
Yes. And it's pretty rad that I love to fluff kittens because of *colliding galaxies.*
Cause if we are little more than hyper complex dominoes there's no good reason to care about anyone, even ourselves.
.
The joke is that there is no reason to care even if that were not true. People have repeatedly pointed out that the existence of "free will" is not enough to save meaning.
Actually it is.
Sure in the vastness of existence we are insignificant dust with little true meaning. However we can take meaning of our own amongst ourselves and that's enough to justify caring about the dust at least a little bit.
If it's all super complex dominoes. I can't even take meaning and enforce it. Any meaning, or a distinct lack of it, is forced upon us.
You can't take meaning and enforce it, because that is not a thing that makes sense. We assign meaning. And we don't need free will to do it.
what does meaning being forced upon us even mean, and why is that the case of we lack "free will"? (You have yet to give a comprehensive definition of "free will" btw. It is still super unclear what it is you think we should be having here.)
There is no true meaning
The only meaning that exists is the subjective meaning we experience
We do not choose that meaning because the meaning is the result of an entirely deterministic environment. Any meaning we experience is forced upon us.
ok what is meaning though? why is it relevant whether determinism is true?
Oh I thought we got past this determinism is no more truth than Catholicism. It's a philosophical concept I am just as free to ignore. You're coming up with an explanation for a gap we do not entirely fathom, and definitely can't currently prove out. (Last i checked westworld was sci fi)
I'm currently granting the point it is true and running to the conclusions it seemingly comes to in a moral context.
Cause if we are little more than hyper complex dominoes there's no good reason to care about anyone, even ourselves.
.
The joke is that there is no reason to care even if that were not true. People have repeatedly pointed out that the existence of "free will" is not enough to save meaning.
Actually it is.
Sure in the vastness of existence we are insignificant dust with little true meaning. However we can take meaning of our own amongst ourselves and that's enough to justify caring about the dust at least a little bit.
If it's all super complex dominoes. I can't even take meaning and enforce it. Any meaning, or a distinct lack of it, is forced upon us.
You can't take meaning and enforce it, because that is not a thing that makes sense. We assign meaning. And we don't need free will to do it.
what does meaning being forced upon us even mean, and why is that the case of we lack "free will"? (You have yet to give a comprehensive definition of "free will" btw. It is still super unclear what it is you think we should be having here.)
There is no true meaning
The only meaning that exists is the subjective meaning we experience
We do not choose that meaning because the meaning is the result of an entirely deterministic environment. Any meaning we experience is forced upon us.
ok what is meaning though? why is it relevant whether determinism is true?
Oh I thought we got past this determinism is no more truth than Catholicism. It's a philosophical concept I am just as free to ignore. You're coming up with an explanation for a gap we do not entirely fathom, and definitely can't currently prove out. (Last i checked westworld was sci fi)
I'm currently granting the point it is true and running to the conclusions it seemingly comes to in a moral context.
no I mean I do not see the difference determinism being true or not makes to what meaning is. You are free to ignore it, but you have to explain why rejecting it suddenly grants "meaningful" meaning or whatever.
like if it's all super complex dominoes, to me meaning remains the same.
Cause if we are little more than hyper complex dominoes there's no good reason to care about anyone, even ourselves.
.
The joke is that there is no reason to care even if that were not true. People have repeatedly pointed out that the existence of "free will" is not enough to save meaning.
Actually it is.
Sure in the vastness of existence we are insignificant dust with little true meaning. However we can take meaning of our own amongst ourselves and that's enough to justify caring about the dust at least a little bit.
If it's all super complex dominoes. I can't even take meaning and enforce it. Any meaning, or a distinct lack of it, is forced upon us.
You can't take meaning and enforce it, because that is not a thing that makes sense. We assign meaning. And we don't need free will to do it.
what does meaning being forced upon us even mean, and why is that the case of we lack "free will"? (You have yet to give a comprehensive definition of "free will" btw. It is still super unclear what it is you think we should be having here.)
There is no true meaning
The only meaning that exists is the subjective meaning we experience
We do not choose that meaning because the meaning is the result of an entirely deterministic environment. Any meaning we experience is forced upon us.
Yes we assign meaning as part of the deterministic process, but again that assignment is forced upon us.
Yes. And it's pretty rad that I love to fluff kittens because of *colliding galaxies.*
That's fine and dandy for you but I spent my childhood bouncing from horror to horror and it leads me to some ends that are decidedly amoral. Should I just embrace those base behaviors and not force myself to build a moral framework to work within? Like if I seemingly, by a nature i'm consistently at odds with, a terrible person... why should I stop myself from being as such? I mean it's not like I can truly be held responsible for my actions (you just went over how free will makes everything 100% your fault, you understand the concept of hold responsible), and I definitely don't need to give a shit about the feelings of my fellow dominoes because I barely give a shit about my feelings. Is there any reason to give a shit. So what if I murder a guy? That was always going to happen and you can't really ever put it on me that I did it because I barely exist and am just the result of unstoppable causal forces.
The universe is no more deterministic that it is made up of a turtle flying through space with the world on its back. It is no more deterministic than the stars are just holes in the sky that the light shines through.
The fact that, technically, the ball can go through the wall by means of every particle in the ball simultaneously tunneling across the wall isn't terribly relevant, though. Technically the ball can go through the wall. Or the ball and the wall could abruptly cease the exist as a ball and a wall and become a gas of their component atoms, or a badger wearing a fez. But the ball will never go through the wall or become a be-fezed badger because the probability of those things happening is so extraordinarily low that throwing the ball at the wall a trillion times is not event the thought of a drop in a bucket the size of an ocean.
Yes, the universe is fundamentally non-deterministic. But at any scale above small collections of atoms the reality of probabilistic processes means that the universe works as if it were purely deterministic. All the air in my house could abruptly be concentrated in one bathroom, leaving me to asphyxiate in hard vacuum, but the number of states where I asphyxiate is so small compared to the number where I don't that I'd have to wait significantly longer than the expected lifetime of the universe for it to happen.
But let's say that neuron action potentials are sufficiently small systems that single electrons tunneling between states has a meaningful impact, and that the action of a single neuron is sufficient to modify the behavior of a human for the sake of argument.
How does that imply free will?
It seems like that's actually the opposite of free will. Random quantum system behavior impacting human behavior seems to imply that our behavior is both non-deterministic and not self-determined. Whether you choose option A or B is the same as whether or not a passing cosmic ray gives you cancer. "You" don't decide A or B, the universe just picks one randomly and arbitrarily. Now your consciousness is a set of dominoes where occasionally one of said dominoes falls in the wrong direction on its own for literally no reason.
Which is actually also how computers work. ECC RAM exists beacuse a sufficient density of physical bits is essentially certain to have a bit randomly flipped by cosmic ray interaction. So I guess a computer without ECC RAM has free will?
The universe is no more deterministic that it is made up of a turtle flying through space with the world on its back. It is no more deterministic than the stars are just holes in the sky that the light shines through.
The fact that, technically, the ball can go through the wall by means of every particle in the ball simultaneously tunneling across the wall isn't terribly relevant, though. Technically the ball can go through the wall. Or the ball and the wall could abruptly cease the exist as a ball and a wall and become a gas of their component atoms, or a badger wearing a fez. But the ball will never go through the wall or become a be-fezed badger because the probability of those things happening is so extraordinarily low that throwing the ball at the wall a trillion times is not event the thought of a drop in a bucket the size of an ocean.
Yes, the universe is fundamentally non-deterministic. But at any scale above small collections of atoms the reality of probabilistic processes means that the universe works as if it were purely deterministic. All the air in my house could abruptly be concentrated in one bathroom, leaving me to asphyxiate in hard vacuum, but the number of states where I asphyxiate is so small compared to the number where I don't that I'd have to wait significantly longer than the expected lifetime of the universe for it to happen.
But let's say that neuron action potentials are sufficiently small systems that single electrons tunneling between states has a meaningful impact, and that the action of a single neuron is sufficient to modify the behavior of a human for the sake of argument.
How does that imply free will?
It seems like that's actually the opposite of free will. Random quantum system behavior impacting human behavior seems to imply that our behavior is both non-deterministic and not self-determined. Whether you choose option A or B is the same as whether or not a passing cosmic ray gives you cancer. "You" don't decide A or B, the universe just picks one randomly and arbitrarily. Now your consciousness is a set of dominoes where occasionally one of said dominoes falls in the wrong direction on its own for literally no reason.
Which is actually also how computers work. ECC RAM exists beacuse a sufficient density of physical bits is essentially certain to have a bit randomly flipped by cosmic ray interaction. So I guess a computer without ECC RAM has free will?
Theoretically I suppose it does.
If it randomly fails, seemingly of its own volition, i'm gonna assign responsibility for the fault on the computer like it was a person. Especially if it is an entirely un reproducable event.
Like i work qa, and i've definitely talked to my system like it's a person on multiple occasions because it wont fail the way it just failed again and there's seemingly no explanation for the one off failure.
Cause if we are little more than hyper complex dominoes there's no good reason to care about anyone, even ourselves.
.
The joke is that there is no reason to care even if that were not true. People have repeatedly pointed out that the existence of "free will" is not enough to save meaning.
Actually it is.
Sure in the vastness of existence we are insignificant dust with little true meaning. However we can take meaning of our own amongst ourselves and that's enough to justify caring about the dust at least a little bit.
If it's all super complex dominoes. I can't even take meaning and enforce it. Any meaning, or a distinct lack of it, is forced upon us.
You can't take meaning and enforce it, because that is not a thing that makes sense. We assign meaning. And we don't need free will to do it.
what does meaning being forced upon us even mean, and why is that the case of we lack "free will"? (You have yet to give a comprehensive definition of "free will" btw. It is still super unclear what it is you think we should be having here.)
There is no true meaning
The only meaning that exists is the subjective meaning we experience
We do not choose that meaning because the meaning is the result of an entirely deterministic environment. Any meaning we experience is forced upon us.
Yes we assign meaning as part of the deterministic process, but again that assignment is forced upon us.
Yes. And it's pretty rad that I love to fluff kittens because of *colliding galaxies.*
That's fine and dandy for you but I spent my childhood bouncing from horror to horror and it leads me to some ends that are decidedly amoral. Should I just embrace those base behaviors and not force myself to build a moral framework to work within? Like if I seemingly, by a nature i'm consistently at odds with, a terrible person... why should I stop myself from being as such? I mean it's not like I can truly be held responsible for my actions (you just went over how free will makes everything 100% your fault, you understand the concept of hold responsible), and I definitely don't need to give a shit about the feelings of my fellow dominoes because I barely give a shit about my feelings. Is there any reason to give a shit. So what if I murder a guy? That was always going to happen and you can't really ever put it on me that I did it because I barely exist and am just the result of unstoppable causal forces.
But again, and before you go and act on those impulses, we don't live in Domino universe. Your actions are NOT pre-determined.
However, I do agree with Sleep here. If we lived in a deterministic universe our 'beliefs' are no more real and important than those of Sephiroth in FF7. We are just mechanical dolls moving along a precisely determined track. Whether you kill someone is 100% as determined in advance as whether or not the sun will come up. Killer Sleep was just as 'guilty of murder' a billion years before he was born as he was while he was holding the knife.
How can a moral framework exist if the universe does not allow for change? Sure, I'm not saying that if you believe the universe is deterministic that you should go rampage through the streets (because, you will still feel your feelings and believe you made a choice even if you didn't) but if you DO rampage through the streets there was never anything you or anyone could ever have done to stop it. Nothing can possibly influence anything.
Cause if we are little more than hyper complex dominoes there's no good reason to care about anyone, even ourselves.
.
The joke is that there is no reason to care even if that were not true. People have repeatedly pointed out that the existence of "free will" is not enough to save meaning.
Actually it is.
Sure in the vastness of existence we are insignificant dust with little true meaning. However we can take meaning of our own amongst ourselves and that's enough to justify caring about the dust at least a little bit.
If it's all super complex dominoes. I can't even take meaning and enforce it. Any meaning, or a distinct lack of it, is forced upon us.
You can't take meaning and enforce it, because that is not a thing that makes sense. We assign meaning. And we don't need free will to do it.
what does meaning being forced upon us even mean, and why is that the case of we lack "free will"? (You have yet to give a comprehensive definition of "free will" btw. It is still super unclear what it is you think we should be having here.)
There is no true meaning
The only meaning that exists is the subjective meaning we experience
We do not choose that meaning because the meaning is the result of an entirely deterministic environment. Any meaning we experience is forced upon us.
Yes we assign meaning as part of the deterministic process, but again that assignment is forced upon us.
Yes. And it's pretty rad that I love to fluff kittens because of *colliding galaxies.*
That's fine and dandy for you but I spent my childhood bouncing from horror to horror and it leads me to some ends that are decidedly amoral. Should I just embrace those base behaviors and not force myself to build a moral framework to work within? Like if I seemingly, by a nature i'm consistently at odds with, a terrible person... why should I stop myself from being as such? I mean it's not like I can truly be held responsible for my actions (you just went over how free will makes everything 100% your fault, you understand the concept of hold responsible), and I definitely don't need to give a shit about the feelings of my fellow dominoes because I barely give a shit about my feelings. Is there any reason to give a shit. So what if I murder a guy? That was always going to happen and you can't really ever put it on me that I did it because I barely exist and am just the result of unstoppable causal forces.
Whether or not you're a bad person and do bad things has surprisingly little to do with the existence of free will.
Whether or not the universe is deterministic we, both individually and as a society of interacting individuals, experience the world as if we had free will.
If human behavior is functionally deterministic, meaning that a sufficiently advanced reasoning system with sufficient knowledge could accurately predict human behavior accurately close enough to 100% of the time that the failure rate is functionally meaningless, then that does not actually change whether or not existing moral, ethical, and jurisprudence systems are correct. That advanced reasoning system, even if it can exist , does not currently exist so we can't base our morality on it.
If a hypothetical system could have prevented the chain of events which leads to you murdering a person and it did not then yes, the responsibility for that murder falls on the system that failed to prevent it. But no such system exists and so the responsibility falls on the murderer. And that responsibility exists because our society functions best when we don't let people murder one another willy-nilly.
There is no reason why society 'should' continue to function well or why we 'should' not all just kill one another and/or ourselves and make humanity cease to exist. The existence of society being inherently 'better' than it not existing implies the existence of a value scale entirely independent from humanity itself.
The universe is no more deterministic that it is made up of a turtle flying through space with the world on its back. It is no more deterministic than the stars are just holes in the sky that the light shines through.
The fact that, technically, the ball can go through the wall by means of every particle in the ball simultaneously tunneling across the wall isn't terribly relevant, though. Technically the ball can go through the wall. Or the ball and the wall could abruptly cease the exist as a ball and a wall and become a gas of their component atoms, or a badger wearing a fez. But the ball will never go through the wall or become a be-fezed badger because the probability of those things happening is so extraordinarily low that throwing the ball at the wall a trillion times is not event the thought of a drop in a bucket the size of an ocean.
Yes, the universe is fundamentally non-deterministic. But at any scale above small collections of atoms the reality of probabilistic processes means that the universe works as if it were purely deterministic. All the air in my house could abruptly be concentrated in one bathroom, leaving me to asphyxiate in hard vacuum, but the number of states where I asphyxiate is so small compared to the number where I don't that I'd have to wait significantly longer than the expected lifetime of the universe for it to happen.
But let's say that neuron action potentials are sufficiently small systems that single electrons tunneling between states has a meaningful impact, and that the action of a single neuron is sufficient to modify the behavior of a human for the sake of argument.
How does that imply free will?
It seems like that's actually the opposite of free will. Random quantum system behavior impacting human behavior seems to imply that our behavior is both non-deterministic and not self-determined. Whether you choose option A or B is the same as whether or not a passing cosmic ray gives you cancer. "You" don't decide A or B, the universe just picks one randomly and arbitrarily. Now your consciousness is a set of dominoes where occasionally one of said dominoes falls in the wrong direction on its own for literally no reason.
Which is actually also how computers work. ECC RAM exists beacuse a sufficient density of physical bits is essentially certain to have a bit randomly flipped by cosmic ray interaction. So I guess a computer without ECC RAM has free will?
In regards to the bolded, we don't need to 'say' that. Its an absolute truth that you have truly random interactions every day and that your behavior is hugely influenced by them. The ball will come off the wall on a random path. The proton might bounce back. The neutrino might hit you in the brain. The rain might come 1 second earlier. The crystal structure might be different. The universe experiences continuous true randomness at the macro scale.
But, to be clear quantum mechanics does not imply free will, it just means that the trivial argument that free will does not exist (Domino universe) doesn't work, and we need to have a more complex discussion about whether we have free will.
Dominos don't have free will is an easy statement to make. No possible definition of free will is compatible with domino universe. If perfect classical mechanics was true, then we DONT have free will.
People making decisions informed by past experience, but in a way which has true unpredictability even when exposed to identical external inputs don't have free will is much harder to prove and requires a detailed discussion of what free will even is. Quantum mechanics IS true, and is important all the time, and so MAYBE we have free will, depending on what free will.
"That is cool" - Abraham Lincoln
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JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
However, I do agree with Sleep here. If we lived in a deterministic universe our 'beliefs' are no more real and important than those of Sephiroth in FF7. We are just mechanical dolls moving along a precisely determined track.
Ok but Sephiroth does not actually have beliefs. But the realness of my beliefs is not in question, regardless of their origin. We are aware mechanical dolls.
However, I do agree with Sleep here. If we lived in a deterministic universe our 'beliefs' are no more real and important than those of Sephiroth in FF7. We are just mechanical dolls moving along a precisely determined track.
Ok but Sephiroth does not actually have beliefs. But the realness of my beliefs is not in question, regardless of their origin. We are aware mechanical dolls.
Are we really or is that awareness the unfortunate echo of dominoes falling
However, I do agree with Sleep here. If we lived in a deterministic universe our 'beliefs' are no more real and important than those of Sephiroth in FF7. We are just mechanical dolls moving along a precisely determined track.
Ok but Sephiroth does not actually have beliefs. But the realness of my beliefs is not in question, regardless of their origin. We are aware mechanical dolls.
No, in a deterministic universe you believe you are an aware mechanical doll. Time doesn't exist in a deterministic universe in a relevant way (there is only 1 state of the universe which defines all times, and nothing can ever influence it). You and Sephiroth are identical. Simply following along a path you can never change. Saying words that you will always say. Thinking thoughts that you would always think.
If Sephiroth said, "I am a real person with real beliefs, I am an aware mechanical doll", would you believe him?
"That is cool" - Abraham Lincoln
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JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
However, I do agree with Sleep here. If we lived in a deterministic universe our 'beliefs' are no more real and important than those of Sephiroth in FF7. We are just mechanical dolls moving along a precisely determined track.
Ok but Sephiroth does not actually have beliefs. But the realness of my beliefs is not in question, regardless of their origin. We are aware mechanical dolls.
Are we really or is that awareness the unfortunate echo of dominoes falling
? This is as nonsensical as asking whether that awareness is just molecules interacting. regardless of their origin. being an echo of falling dominoes does not make us not really aware.
the realness of our awareness is not in question. it is a given. it is literally our point of interaction with the world. not being mindless automatons is a founding principle of philosophy.
However, I do agree with Sleep here. If we lived in a deterministic universe our 'beliefs' are no more real and important than those of Sephiroth in FF7. We are just mechanical dolls moving along a precisely determined track.
Ok but Sephiroth does not actually have beliefs. But the realness of my beliefs is not in question, regardless of their origin. We are aware mechanical dolls.
Are we really or is that awareness the unfortunate echo of dominoes falling
? This is as nonsensical as asking whether that awareness is just molecules interacting. regardless of their origin. being an echo of falling dominoes does not make us not really aware.
the realness of our awareness is not in question. it is a given. it is literally our point of interaction with the world. not being mindless automatons is a founding principle of philosophy.
But being mindless automatons working on nothing but the forces that propel us is the central principal of this determinism.
The universe is no more deterministic that it is made up of a turtle flying through space with the world on its back. It is no more deterministic than the stars are just holes in the sky that the light shines through.
The fact that, technically, the ball can go through the wall by means of every particle in the ball simultaneously tunneling across the wall isn't terribly relevant, though. Technically the ball can go through the wall. Or the ball and the wall could abruptly cease the exist as a ball and a wall and become a gas of their component atoms, or a badger wearing a fez. But the ball will never go through the wall or become a be-fezed badger because the probability of those things happening is so extraordinarily low that throwing the ball at the wall a trillion times is not event the thought of a drop in a bucket the size of an ocean.
Yes, the universe is fundamentally non-deterministic. But at any scale above small collections of atoms the reality of probabilistic processes means that the universe works as if it were purely deterministic. All the air in my house could abruptly be concentrated in one bathroom, leaving me to asphyxiate in hard vacuum, but the number of states where I asphyxiate is so small compared to the number where I don't that I'd have to wait significantly longer than the expected lifetime of the universe for it to happen.
But let's say that neuron action potentials are sufficiently small systems that single electrons tunneling between states has a meaningful impact, and that the action of a single neuron is sufficient to modify the behavior of a human for the sake of argument.
How does that imply free will?
It seems like that's actually the opposite of free will. Random quantum system behavior impacting human behavior seems to imply that our behavior is both non-deterministic and not self-determined. Whether you choose option A or B is the same as whether or not a passing cosmic ray gives you cancer. "You" don't decide A or B, the universe just picks one randomly and arbitrarily. Now your consciousness is a set of dominoes where occasionally one of said dominoes falls in the wrong direction on its own for literally no reason.
Which is actually also how computers work. ECC RAM exists beacuse a sufficient density of physical bits is essentially certain to have a bit randomly flipped by cosmic ray interaction. So I guess a computer without ECC RAM has free will?
In regards to the bolded, we don't need to 'say' that. Its an absolute truth that you have truly random interactions every day and that your behavior is hugely influenced by them. The ball will come off the wall on a random path. The proton might bounce back. The neutrino might hit you in the brain. The rain might come 1 second earlier. The crystal structure might be different. The universe experiences continuous true randomness at the macro scale.
But, to be clear quantum mechanics does not imply free will, it just means that the trivial argument that free will does not exist (Domino universe) doesn't work, and we need to have a more complex discussion about whether we have free will.
Dominos don't have free will is an easy statement to make. No possible definition of free will is compatible with domino universe. If perfect classical mechanics was true, then we DONT have free will.
People making decisions informed by past experience, but in a way which has true unpredictability even when exposed to identical external inputs don't have free will is much harder to prove and requires a detailed discussion of what free will even is. Quantum mechanics IS true, and is important all the time, and so MAYBE we have free will, depending on what free will.
Let me preface by saying that I agree with you about the fundamental unpredictability of the universe.
I'm pretty sure the bold part is not actually true. A single proton or electron will elastically scatter in a truly random direction but a macro-scale ball will follow a predictable trajectory a sufficiently large percentage of the time as to be functionally "always". Bouncing an actual ball off an actual wall looks random because balls aren't perfect spheres, walls aren't perfect planes, and your hand is a fantastically shitty mechanism to reliably impact the same force on a system repeatedly. Given a sufficiently spherical ball, a sufficiently flat wall, and a sufficiently accurate throwing mechanism, I'm pretty sure I could reliably predict its post-bounce trajectory 99.enough-9's-I'm-calling-it-100% of the time.
That said, the appearance of randomness in what direction the ball goes when you throw it at the wall is a good metaphore for why I think the concept of "free will" is still meaningful in a hard-deterministic, 'domino' universe.
It doesn't matter that a sufficiently accurate simulation could accurately predict the trajectory of the ball because, when you throw it, you don't have one of those on hand. The best you can do is guess roughly which way it will bounce.
The fact that in a hard-deterministic universe all human actions are technically predictable does not change the experiential life of any individual human. Humans, if the universe were deterministic but otherwise indistinguishable from our own, still feel free-willed. And lacking the simulation hardware to prove otherwise it is the only rational, functional choice to base your moral system on that experience of free will.
However, I do agree with Sleep here. If we lived in a deterministic universe our 'beliefs' are no more real and important than those of Sephiroth in FF7. We are just mechanical dolls moving along a precisely determined track.
Ok but Sephiroth does not actually have beliefs. But the realness of my beliefs is not in question, regardless of their origin. We are aware mechanical dolls.
Are we really or is that awareness the unfortunate echo of dominoes falling
? This is as nonsensical as asking whether that awareness is just molecules interacting. regardless of their origin. being an echo of falling dominoes does not make us not really aware.
the realness of our awareness is not in question. it is a given. it is literally our point of interaction with the world. not being mindless automatons is a founding principle of philosophy.
But being mindless automatons working on nothing but the forces that propel us is the central principal of this determinism.
For a very weird definition of "mindless automaton", yes.
I both believe the universe is inherently non-determinstic and that human behavior is inherently deterministic. In the sense that we are meat machines following a sort of programming, yes, we are 'mindless automata'.
However, we are mindless automata who experience our own existence as though we were mindful and free-willed.
I don't think that "free will" exists any more than the color red exists. The color red is what we have chosen to call a certain portion of the EM spectrum for purely functional reasons. Red "exists" because it is useful to us to have the idea of and name for it. It has no inherent meaning or value divorced from its import in the human experience. Without humans, red would not exist in any meaningful sense. Yet we clearly experience redness daily and trying to claim that because it's something invented by humans and entirely contained within the sphere of human experience is a useless distinction.
We experience our own existence as if we were free willed. Because we have no system which accurately predicts our predictable behavior, that predictability is meaningless.
The universe is no more deterministic that it is made up of a turtle flying through space with the world on its back. It is no more deterministic than the stars are just holes in the sky that the light shines through.
The fact that, technically, the ball can go through the wall by means of every particle in the ball simultaneously tunneling across the wall isn't terribly relevant, though. Technically the ball can go through the wall. Or the ball and the wall could abruptly cease the exist as a ball and a wall and become a gas of their component atoms, or a badger wearing a fez. But the ball will never go through the wall or become a be-fezed badger because the probability of those things happening is so extraordinarily low that throwing the ball at the wall a trillion times is not event the thought of a drop in a bucket the size of an ocean.
Yes, the universe is fundamentally non-deterministic. But at any scale above small collections of atoms the reality of probabilistic processes means that the universe works as if it were purely deterministic. All the air in my house could abruptly be concentrated in one bathroom, leaving me to asphyxiate in hard vacuum, but the number of states where I asphyxiate is so small compared to the number where I don't that I'd have to wait significantly longer than the expected lifetime of the universe for it to happen.
But let's say that neuron action potentials are sufficiently small systems that single electrons tunneling between states has a meaningful impact, and that the action of a single neuron is sufficient to modify the behavior of a human for the sake of argument.
How does that imply free will?
It seems like that's actually the opposite of free will. Random quantum system behavior impacting human behavior seems to imply that our behavior is both non-deterministic and not self-determined. Whether you choose option A or B is the same as whether or not a passing cosmic ray gives you cancer. "You" don't decide A or B, the universe just picks one randomly and arbitrarily. Now your consciousness is a set of dominoes where occasionally one of said dominoes falls in the wrong direction on its own for literally no reason.
Which is actually also how computers work. ECC RAM exists beacuse a sufficient density of physical bits is essentially certain to have a bit randomly flipped by cosmic ray interaction. So I guess a computer without ECC RAM has free will?
In regards to the bolded, we don't need to 'say' that. Its an absolute truth that you have truly random interactions every day and that your behavior is hugely influenced by them. The ball will come off the wall on a random path. The proton might bounce back. The neutrino might hit you in the brain. The rain might come 1 second earlier. The crystal structure might be different. The universe experiences continuous true randomness at the macro scale.
But, to be clear quantum mechanics does not imply free will, it just means that the trivial argument that free will does not exist (Domino universe) doesn't work, and we need to have a more complex discussion about whether we have free will.
Dominos don't have free will is an easy statement to make. No possible definition of free will is compatible with domino universe. If perfect classical mechanics was true, then we DONT have free will.
People making decisions informed by past experience, but in a way which has true unpredictability even when exposed to identical external inputs don't have free will is much harder to prove and requires a detailed discussion of what free will even is. Quantum mechanics IS true, and is important all the time, and so MAYBE we have free will, depending on what free will.
Let me preface by saying that I agree with you about the fundamental unpredictability of the universe.
I'm pretty sure the bold part is not actually true. A single proton or electron will elastically scatter in a truly random direction but a macro-scale ball will follow a predictable trajectory a sufficiently large percentage of the time as to be functionally "always". Bouncing an actual ball off an actual wall looks random because balls aren't perfect spheres, walls aren't perfect planes, and your hand is a fantastically shitty mechanism to reliably impact the same force on a system repeatedly. Given a sufficiently spherical ball, a sufficiently flat wall, and a sufficiently accurate throwing mechanism, I'm pretty sure I could reliably predict its post-bounce trajectory 99.enough-9's-I'm-calling-it-100% of the time.
That said, the appearance of randomness in what direction the ball goes when you throw it at the wall is a good metaphore for why I think the concept of "free will" is still meaningful in a hard-deterministic, 'domino' universe.
It doesn't matter that a sufficiently accurate simulation could accurately predict the trajectory of the ball because, when you throw it, you don't have one of those on hand. The best you can do is guess roughly which way it will bounce.
The fact that in a hard-deterministic universe all human actions are technically predictable does not change the experiential life of any individual human. Humans, if the universe were deterministic but otherwise indistinguishable from our own, still feel free-willed. And lacking the simulation hardware to prove otherwise it is the only rational, functional choice to base your moral system on that experience of free will.
Right so like ive been saying, hard determinism is essentially morally bankrupt.
Like if you try to build a moral framework within it, in a way that fully defies free will or unpredictability (if those words for it make you feel better), you end up with nothing.
No one's doing bad stuff and you can't assign even .01% of responsibility on anything but the universe itself. We are nothing more than mindless automatons that somehow think they are more.
To build any morality system where we are responsible for our actions you've got to say there's a free will (even if you just call it unpredictably because you dislike the words free will). Even if you admit "given perfect knowledge we could definitely predict everything and free will is a lie" you have to just drop it, treat people like they have real choices, and continue on with a morality system that places at least limited responsibility for action on the being performing the action.
Even if you have stumbled upon some kind of universal truth here it is totally useless because you can't base any kind of ethos or philosophy on it because it's like first implication is that we are barely aware atomatons acting on a determined path.
The universe is no more deterministic that it is made up of a turtle flying through space with the world on its back. It is no more deterministic than the stars are just holes in the sky that the light shines through.
The fact that, technically, the ball can go through the wall by means of every particle in the ball simultaneously tunneling across the wall isn't terribly relevant, though. Technically the ball can go through the wall. Or the ball and the wall could abruptly cease the exist as a ball and a wall and become a gas of their component atoms, or a badger wearing a fez. But the ball will never go through the wall or become a be-fezed badger because the probability of those things happening is so extraordinarily low that throwing the ball at the wall a trillion times is not event the thought of a drop in a bucket the size of an ocean.
Yes, the universe is fundamentally non-deterministic. But at any scale above small collections of atoms the reality of probabilistic processes means that the universe works as if it were purely deterministic. All the air in my house could abruptly be concentrated in one bathroom, leaving me to asphyxiate in hard vacuum, but the number of states where I asphyxiate is so small compared to the number where I don't that I'd have to wait significantly longer than the expected lifetime of the universe for it to happen.
But let's say that neuron action potentials are sufficiently small systems that single electrons tunneling between states has a meaningful impact, and that the action of a single neuron is sufficient to modify the behavior of a human for the sake of argument.
How does that imply free will?
It seems like that's actually the opposite of free will. Random quantum system behavior impacting human behavior seems to imply that our behavior is both non-deterministic and not self-determined. Whether you choose option A or B is the same as whether or not a passing cosmic ray gives you cancer. "You" don't decide A or B, the universe just picks one randomly and arbitrarily. Now your consciousness is a set of dominoes where occasionally one of said dominoes falls in the wrong direction on its own for literally no reason.
Which is actually also how computers work. ECC RAM exists beacuse a sufficient density of physical bits is essentially certain to have a bit randomly flipped by cosmic ray interaction. So I guess a computer without ECC RAM has free will?
In regards to the bolded, we don't need to 'say' that. Its an absolute truth that you have truly random interactions every day and that your behavior is hugely influenced by them. The ball will come off the wall on a random path. The proton might bounce back. The neutrino might hit you in the brain. The rain might come 1 second earlier. The crystal structure might be different. The universe experiences continuous true randomness at the macro scale.
But, to be clear quantum mechanics does not imply free will, it just means that the trivial argument that free will does not exist (Domino universe) doesn't work, and we need to have a more complex discussion about whether we have free will.
Dominos don't have free will is an easy statement to make. No possible definition of free will is compatible with domino universe. If perfect classical mechanics was true, then we DONT have free will.
People making decisions informed by past experience, but in a way which has true unpredictability even when exposed to identical external inputs don't have free will is much harder to prove and requires a detailed discussion of what free will even is. Quantum mechanics IS true, and is important all the time, and so MAYBE we have free will, depending on what free will.
Let me preface by saying that I agree with you about the fundamental unpredictability of the universe.
I'm pretty sure the bold part is not actually true. A single proton or electron will elastically scatter in a truly random direction but a macro-scale ball will follow a predictable trajectory a sufficiently large percentage of the time as to be functionally "always". Bouncing an actual ball off an actual wall looks random because balls aren't perfect spheres, walls aren't perfect planes, and your hand is a fantastically shitty mechanism to reliably impact the same force on a system repeatedly. Given a sufficiently spherical ball, a sufficiently flat wall, and a sufficiently accurate throwing mechanism, I'm pretty sure I could reliably predict its post-bounce trajectory 99.enough-9's-I'm-calling-it-100% of the time.
That said, the appearance of randomness in what direction the ball goes when you throw it at the wall is a good metaphore for why I think the concept of "free will" is still meaningful in a hard-deterministic, 'domino' universe.
It doesn't matter that a sufficiently accurate simulation could accurately predict the trajectory of the ball because, when you throw it, you don't have one of those on hand. The best you can do is guess roughly which way it will bounce.
The fact that in a hard-deterministic universe all human actions are technically predictable does not change the experiential life of any individual human. Humans, if the universe were deterministic but otherwise indistinguishable from our own, still feel free-willed. And lacking the simulation hardware to prove otherwise it is the only rational, functional choice to base your moral system on that experience of free will.
A 'sufficiently round ball' is literally forbidden from existing by the rules of quantum mechanics. Balls dont exist with a nice neat surface. They are continuously changing probability distributions with continuously morphing surfaces, densities, and rigidities. No device exists which can move one on an 'accurate path' because the concept of an 'accurate path' is not a real thing which exists. No wall can exist which is flat and so on. Yes, perhaps with a big ball, a flattish wall, and a person who is relatively good at catching the 'causality chain' will (on a human timescale) always look like this
Human throws ball at wall
Ball bounces back
Human catches ball
But, as I detailed above thats only because this causality chain is full of massive objects, short timescales, and low energy interactions. You're 99.99 etc % chance is only so big because you've set up the experiment to be so short timescale, low energy and simply defined. Maybe the human has to catch the ball 1 cm lower sometimes, and suddenly we're exposed to chaos again. Now, with balls bouncing off walls there is a MASSIVE pseuodorandom component too, where the ball looks like it bounced randomly, but actually that is because the ball is an oval, not round by simple measurement but there's still a quantum true random component too.
Have that same human fire a single proton at the wall and suddenly we have immediate chaos in the causality chain. Immediate true quantum mechanics chaos.
Human fires proton
Who the goose knows what happens? I don't know, probably it goes through? But, theres a solid chance it comes back too.
Probability distributions exist. Physical objects as we perceive them to be do not.
The universe is no more deterministic that it is made up of a turtle flying through space with the world on its back. It is no more deterministic than the stars are just holes in the sky that the light shines through.
The fact that, technically, the ball can go through the wall by means of every particle in the ball simultaneously tunneling across the wall isn't terribly relevant, though. Technically the ball can go through the wall. Or the ball and the wall could abruptly cease the exist as a ball and a wall and become a gas of their component atoms, or a badger wearing a fez. But the ball will never go through the wall or become a be-fezed badger because the probability of those things happening is so extraordinarily low that throwing the ball at the wall a trillion times is not event the thought of a drop in a bucket the size of an ocean.
Yes, the universe is fundamentally non-deterministic. But at any scale above small collections of atoms the reality of probabilistic processes means that the universe works as if it were purely deterministic. All the air in my house could abruptly be concentrated in one bathroom, leaving me to asphyxiate in hard vacuum, but the number of states where I asphyxiate is so small compared to the number where I don't that I'd have to wait significantly longer than the expected lifetime of the universe for it to happen.
But let's say that neuron action potentials are sufficiently small systems that single electrons tunneling between states has a meaningful impact, and that the action of a single neuron is sufficient to modify the behavior of a human for the sake of argument.
How does that imply free will?
It seems like that's actually the opposite of free will. Random quantum system behavior impacting human behavior seems to imply that our behavior is both non-deterministic and not self-determined. Whether you choose option A or B is the same as whether or not a passing cosmic ray gives you cancer. "You" don't decide A or B, the universe just picks one randomly and arbitrarily. Now your consciousness is a set of dominoes where occasionally one of said dominoes falls in the wrong direction on its own for literally no reason.
Which is actually also how computers work. ECC RAM exists beacuse a sufficient density of physical bits is essentially certain to have a bit randomly flipped by cosmic ray interaction. So I guess a computer without ECC RAM has free will?
In regards to the bolded, we don't need to 'say' that. Its an absolute truth that you have truly random interactions every day and that your behavior is hugely influenced by them. The ball will come off the wall on a random path. The proton might bounce back. The neutrino might hit you in the brain. The rain might come 1 second earlier. The crystal structure might be different. The universe experiences continuous true randomness at the macro scale.
But, to be clear quantum mechanics does not imply free will, it just means that the trivial argument that free will does not exist (Domino universe) doesn't work, and we need to have a more complex discussion about whether we have free will.
Dominos don't have free will is an easy statement to make. No possible definition of free will is compatible with domino universe. If perfect classical mechanics was true, then we DONT have free will.
People making decisions informed by past experience, but in a way which has true unpredictability even when exposed to identical external inputs don't have free will is much harder to prove and requires a detailed discussion of what free will even is. Quantum mechanics IS true, and is important all the time, and so MAYBE we have free will, depending on what free will.
Let me preface by saying that I agree with you about the fundamental unpredictability of the universe.
I'm pretty sure the bold part is not actually true. A single proton or electron will elastically scatter in a truly random direction but a macro-scale ball will follow a predictable trajectory a sufficiently large percentage of the time as to be functionally "always". Bouncing an actual ball off an actual wall looks random because balls aren't perfect spheres, walls aren't perfect planes, and your hand is a fantastically shitty mechanism to reliably impact the same force on a system repeatedly. Given a sufficiently spherical ball, a sufficiently flat wall, and a sufficiently accurate throwing mechanism, I'm pretty sure I could reliably predict its post-bounce trajectory 99.enough-9's-I'm-calling-it-100% of the time.
That said, the appearance of randomness in what direction the ball goes when you throw it at the wall is a good metaphore for why I think the concept of "free will" is still meaningful in a hard-deterministic, 'domino' universe.
It doesn't matter that a sufficiently accurate simulation could accurately predict the trajectory of the ball because, when you throw it, you don't have one of those on hand. The best you can do is guess roughly which way it will bounce.
The fact that in a hard-deterministic universe all human actions are technically predictable does not change the experiential life of any individual human. Humans, if the universe were deterministic but otherwise indistinguishable from our own, still feel free-willed. And lacking the simulation hardware to prove otherwise it is the only rational, functional choice to base your moral system on that experience of free will.
Right so like ive been saying, hard determinism is essentially morally bankrupt.
Like if you try to build a moral framework within it, in a way that fully defies free will or unpredictability (if those words for it make you feel better), you end up with nothing.
No one's doing bad stuff and you can't assign even .01% of responsibility on anything but the universe itself. We are nothing more than mindless automatons that somehow think they are more.
To build any morality system where we are responsible for our actions you've got to say there's a free will (even if you just call it unpredictably because you dislike the words free will). Even if you admit "given perfect knowledge we could definitely predict everything and free will is a lie" you have to just drop it, treat people like they have real choices, and continue on with a morality system that places at least limited responsibility for action on the being performing the action.
Even if you have stumbled upon some kind of universal truth here it is totally useless because you can't base any kind of ethos or philosophy on it because it's like first implication is that we are barely aware atomatons acting on a determined path.
I disagree.
Acting as though people have free will isn't the same as believing that people have free will.
We act as though humans actions are unpredictable to the extent that it is more useful than doing otherwise and with the understanding that we should do otherwise as the opportunity presents itself.
Look at the American correctional system as an example.
It is morally bankrupt and abominable precisely because it treats free will as a real thing and pretends that human behavior is unpredictable.
The way that the prison system works and the way that ex-cons re-enter life can be very easily shown to lead to high rates of recidivism. That could be dramatically improved with changes to the system but those changes aren't made, at least in part, because "people have free will and can just choose not to do crime".
As someone said a few pages ago: we take away people's driver's licenses when they have too many DUIs or too many traffic violations. Why do we do that? Because human behavior is predictable and based on a relatively small amount of information it's easy to predict that someone who drinks and drives is going to keep drinking and driving.
If we just assume that human behavior is unpredictable and it's impossible to guess what someone will do in the future then we can just throw away psychology, anthropology, and sociology.
If you assume that humans are only unpredictable because we don't have enough data or sufficiently powerful data-crunching apparatus then we can keep striving toward that point and maybe, eventually, improve the aspects of life that can be improved via prediction of human behavior.
I also don't understand your statement about "barely aware automatons". Deterministically-behaving humans are as aware as anything in the known universe.
My point is that our understanding of physics says that your perfectly understood gas model is impossible. You cannot understand a gas well enough to say completely what state it will be in in 5 seconds, only vaguely. If you could, if would be proof we were living in an incomplete simulation where lazy programmers had turned off quantum physics and the effects it has on large particles.
wait, are you saying that something in the laws of physics as we understand it right now is in direct opposition to a perfectly understood gas model?
if so, which law is that?
or are you saying that our limited understanding and limited processing power make it so we can't create a perfect gas model right now?
i can't imagine you are saying the latter so i am intensely interested in your response to the former.
If I take 100 atoms of xenon, and fire them all at the 'same' speed along the 'same' path at a wall made of copper, they will come off in random directions. The more and more and more we study that system, the closer the directions will become to being not random, but eventually we will reach the quantum level of the interaction (can't know the momentum and position of a thing at the same time for all the electrons in the xenon particle and the wall) and no level of superior measurement will decrease its random width.
Some gas molecules will go this way, others will go that way. Some will stick to the wall, and you won't know what will happen EXACTLY, until after you have performed the experiment. Our system where through careful and dilligent measurement we had forced the local entropy as low as it could possibly go, will immediately start increasing in entropy again, creating real unpredictable randomness.
It may be possible that you can get SUPER damn close to predicting the outcome (say, billiard balls on a table), but you still can't predict the complete relevant outcome. Nothing is exactly predictable. All the air in this room could suddenly go into one corner and stay there for a week. That is a possibility, it COULD happen, and no amount of measurement of the gas in the room would allow you to say that it can't happen.
since we are in the realm of pure theory, i'd like to hear your response to this:
if you take one atom of xenon and add one newton of force to it, then you do the exact same thing again 1 second later so that the only difference in the two experiments is time, and there are no other physical stimuli at all interacting with this atom of xenon are you saying that you believe the two atoms of xenon will act differently?
if this is what you are saying, then you are effectively saying a + a = 2a in one circumstance but in the identical circumstance, a + a =/= 2a. in which case, i have no idea what you are saying.
if you agree with me that the xenon would do the same thing in both instances, then all you are saying is we cannot yet understand and calculate for all the possible physical stimuli that act on these 100 atoms of xenon. in which case i would say, that's not free will, that's just a math problem.
I don't treat people like they have free will. I actively do things to determine their behavior so that they lead happy, healthy lives. Hugs are great for changing human behavior.
The universe is no more deterministic that it is made up of a turtle flying through space with the world on its back. It is no more deterministic than the stars are just holes in the sky that the light shines through.
The fact that, technically, the ball can go through the wall by means of every particle in the ball simultaneously tunneling across the wall isn't terribly relevant, though. Technically the ball can go through the wall. Or the ball and the wall could abruptly cease the exist as a ball and a wall and become a gas of their component atoms, or a badger wearing a fez. But the ball will never go through the wall or become a be-fezed badger because the probability of those things happening is so extraordinarily low that throwing the ball at the wall a trillion times is not event the thought of a drop in a bucket the size of an ocean.
Yes, the universe is fundamentally non-deterministic. But at any scale above small collections of atoms the reality of probabilistic processes means that the universe works as if it were purely deterministic. All the air in my house could abruptly be concentrated in one bathroom, leaving me to asphyxiate in hard vacuum, but the number of states where I asphyxiate is so small compared to the number where I don't that I'd have to wait significantly longer than the expected lifetime of the universe for it to happen.
But let's say that neuron action potentials are sufficiently small systems that single electrons tunneling between states has a meaningful impact, and that the action of a single neuron is sufficient to modify the behavior of a human for the sake of argument.
How does that imply free will?
It seems like that's actually the opposite of free will. Random quantum system behavior impacting human behavior seems to imply that our behavior is both non-deterministic and not self-determined. Whether you choose option A or B is the same as whether or not a passing cosmic ray gives you cancer. "You" don't decide A or B, the universe just picks one randomly and arbitrarily. Now your consciousness is a set of dominoes where occasionally one of said dominoes falls in the wrong direction on its own for literally no reason.
Which is actually also how computers work. ECC RAM exists beacuse a sufficient density of physical bits is essentially certain to have a bit randomly flipped by cosmic ray interaction. So I guess a computer without ECC RAM has free will?
In regards to the bolded, we don't need to 'say' that. Its an absolute truth that you have truly random interactions every day and that your behavior is hugely influenced by them. The ball will come off the wall on a random path. The proton might bounce back. The neutrino might hit you in the brain. The rain might come 1 second earlier. The crystal structure might be different. The universe experiences continuous true randomness at the macro scale.
But, to be clear quantum mechanics does not imply free will, it just means that the trivial argument that free will does not exist (Domino universe) doesn't work, and we need to have a more complex discussion about whether we have free will.
Dominos don't have free will is an easy statement to make. No possible definition of free will is compatible with domino universe. If perfect classical mechanics was true, then we DONT have free will.
People making decisions informed by past experience, but in a way which has true unpredictability even when exposed to identical external inputs don't have free will is much harder to prove and requires a detailed discussion of what free will even is. Quantum mechanics IS true, and is important all the time, and so MAYBE we have free will, depending on what free will.
Let me preface by saying that I agree with you about the fundamental unpredictability of the universe.
I'm pretty sure the bold part is not actually true. A single proton or electron will elastically scatter in a truly random direction but a macro-scale ball will follow a predictable trajectory a sufficiently large percentage of the time as to be functionally "always". Bouncing an actual ball off an actual wall looks random because balls aren't perfect spheres, walls aren't perfect planes, and your hand is a fantastically shitty mechanism to reliably impact the same force on a system repeatedly. Given a sufficiently spherical ball, a sufficiently flat wall, and a sufficiently accurate throwing mechanism, I'm pretty sure I could reliably predict its post-bounce trajectory 99.enough-9's-I'm-calling-it-100% of the time.
That said, the appearance of randomness in what direction the ball goes when you throw it at the wall is a good metaphore for why I think the concept of "free will" is still meaningful in a hard-deterministic, 'domino' universe.
It doesn't matter that a sufficiently accurate simulation could accurately predict the trajectory of the ball because, when you throw it, you don't have one of those on hand. The best you can do is guess roughly which way it will bounce.
The fact that in a hard-deterministic universe all human actions are technically predictable does not change the experiential life of any individual human. Humans, if the universe were deterministic but otherwise indistinguishable from our own, still feel free-willed. And lacking the simulation hardware to prove otherwise it is the only rational, functional choice to base your moral system on that experience of free will.
Right so like ive been saying, hard determinism is essentially morally bankrupt.
Like if you try to build a moral framework within it, in a way that fully defies free will or unpredictability (if those words for it make you feel better), you end up with nothing.
No one's doing bad stuff and you can't assign even .01% of responsibility on anything but the universe itself. We are nothing more than mindless automatons that somehow think they are more.
To build any morality system where we are responsible for our actions you've got to say there's a free will (even if you just call it unpredictably because you dislike the words free will). Even if you admit "given perfect knowledge we could definitely predict everything and free will is a lie" you have to just drop it, treat people like they have real choices, and continue on with a morality system that places at least limited responsibility for action on the being performing the action.
Even if you have stumbled upon some kind of universal truth here it is totally useless because you can't base any kind of ethos or philosophy on it because it's like first implication is that we are barely aware atomatons acting on a determined path.
I disagree.
Acting as though people have free will isn't the same as believing that people have free will.
We act as though humans actions are unpredictable to the extent that it is more useful than doing otherwise and with the understanding that we should do otherwise as the opportunity presents itself.
Look at the American correctional system as an example.
It is morally bankrupt and abominable precisely because it treats free will as a real thing and pretends that human behavior is unpredictable.
The way that the prison system works and the way that ex-cons re-enter life can be very easily shown to lead to high rates of recidivism. That could be dramatically improved with changes to the system but those changes aren't made, at least in part, because "people have free will and can just choose not to do crime".
As someone said a few pages ago: we take away people's driver's licenses when they have too many DUIs or too many traffic violations. Why do we do that? Because human behavior is predictable and based on a relatively small amount of information it's easy to predict that someone who drinks and drives is going to keep drinking and driving.
If we just assume that human behavior is unpredictable and it's impossible to guess what someone will do in the future then we can just throw away psychology, anthropology, and sociology.
If you assume that humans are only unpredictable because we don't have enough data or sufficiently powerful data-crunching apparatus then we can keep striving toward that point and maybe, eventually, improve the aspects of life that can be improved via prediction of human behavior.
I also don't understand your statement about "barely aware automatons". Deterministically-behaving humans are as aware as anything in the known universe.
Being able to see the outcome (the predictions) means you can't do anything to improve it or change it.
The universe is no more deterministic that it is made up of a turtle flying through space with the world on its back. It is no more deterministic than the stars are just holes in the sky that the light shines through.
The fact that, technically, the ball can go through the wall by means of every particle in the ball simultaneously tunneling across the wall isn't terribly relevant, though. Technically the ball can go through the wall. Or the ball and the wall could abruptly cease the exist as a ball and a wall and become a gas of their component atoms, or a badger wearing a fez. But the ball will never go through the wall or become a be-fezed badger because the probability of those things happening is so extraordinarily low that throwing the ball at the wall a trillion times is not event the thought of a drop in a bucket the size of an ocean.
Yes, the universe is fundamentally non-deterministic. But at any scale above small collections of atoms the reality of probabilistic processes means that the universe works as if it were purely deterministic. All the air in my house could abruptly be concentrated in one bathroom, leaving me to asphyxiate in hard vacuum, but the number of states where I asphyxiate is so small compared to the number where I don't that I'd have to wait significantly longer than the expected lifetime of the universe for it to happen.
But let's say that neuron action potentials are sufficiently small systems that single electrons tunneling between states has a meaningful impact, and that the action of a single neuron is sufficient to modify the behavior of a human for the sake of argument.
How does that imply free will?
It seems like that's actually the opposite of free will. Random quantum system behavior impacting human behavior seems to imply that our behavior is both non-deterministic and not self-determined. Whether you choose option A or B is the same as whether or not a passing cosmic ray gives you cancer. "You" don't decide A or B, the universe just picks one randomly and arbitrarily. Now your consciousness is a set of dominoes where occasionally one of said dominoes falls in the wrong direction on its own for literally no reason.
Which is actually also how computers work. ECC RAM exists beacuse a sufficient density of physical bits is essentially certain to have a bit randomly flipped by cosmic ray interaction. So I guess a computer without ECC RAM has free will?
In regards to the bolded, we don't need to 'say' that. Its an absolute truth that you have truly random interactions every day and that your behavior is hugely influenced by them. The ball will come off the wall on a random path. The proton might bounce back. The neutrino might hit you in the brain. The rain might come 1 second earlier. The crystal structure might be different. The universe experiences continuous true randomness at the macro scale.
But, to be clear quantum mechanics does not imply free will, it just means that the trivial argument that free will does not exist (Domino universe) doesn't work, and we need to have a more complex discussion about whether we have free will.
Dominos don't have free will is an easy statement to make. No possible definition of free will is compatible with domino universe. If perfect classical mechanics was true, then we DONT have free will.
People making decisions informed by past experience, but in a way which has true unpredictability even when exposed to identical external inputs don't have free will is much harder to prove and requires a detailed discussion of what free will even is. Quantum mechanics IS true, and is important all the time, and so MAYBE we have free will, depending on what free will.
Let me preface by saying that I agree with you about the fundamental unpredictability of the universe.
I'm pretty sure the bold part is not actually true. A single proton or electron will elastically scatter in a truly random direction but a macro-scale ball will follow a predictable trajectory a sufficiently large percentage of the time as to be functionally "always". Bouncing an actual ball off an actual wall looks random because balls aren't perfect spheres, walls aren't perfect planes, and your hand is a fantastically shitty mechanism to reliably impact the same force on a system repeatedly. Given a sufficiently spherical ball, a sufficiently flat wall, and a sufficiently accurate throwing mechanism, I'm pretty sure I could reliably predict its post-bounce trajectory 99.enough-9's-I'm-calling-it-100% of the time.
That said, the appearance of randomness in what direction the ball goes when you throw it at the wall is a good metaphore for why I think the concept of "free will" is still meaningful in a hard-deterministic, 'domino' universe.
It doesn't matter that a sufficiently accurate simulation could accurately predict the trajectory of the ball because, when you throw it, you don't have one of those on hand. The best you can do is guess roughly which way it will bounce.
The fact that in a hard-deterministic universe all human actions are technically predictable does not change the experiential life of any individual human. Humans, if the universe were deterministic but otherwise indistinguishable from our own, still feel free-willed. And lacking the simulation hardware to prove otherwise it is the only rational, functional choice to base your moral system on that experience of free will.
Right so like ive been saying, hard determinism is essentially morally bankrupt.
Like if you try to build a moral framework within it, in a way that fully defies free will or unpredictability (if those words for it make you feel better), you end up with nothing.
No one's doing bad stuff and you can't assign even .01% of responsibility on anything but the universe itself. We are nothing more than mindless automatons that somehow think they are more.
To build any morality system where we are responsible for our actions you've got to say there's a free will (even if you just call it unpredictably because you dislike the words free will). Even if you admit "given perfect knowledge we could definitely predict everything and free will is a lie" you have to just drop it, treat people like they have real choices, and continue on with a morality system that places at least limited responsibility for action on the being performing the action.
Even if you have stumbled upon some kind of universal truth here it is totally useless because you can't base any kind of ethos or philosophy on it because it's like first implication is that we are barely aware atomatons acting on a determined path.
I disagree.
Acting as though people have free will isn't the same as believing that people have free will.
We act as though humans actions are unpredictable to the extent that it is more useful than doing otherwise and with the understanding that we should do otherwise as the opportunity presents itself.
Look at the American correctional system as an example.
It is morally bankrupt and abominable precisely because it treats free will as a real thing and pretends that human behavior is unpredictable.
The way that the prison system works and the way that ex-cons re-enter life can be very easily shown to lead to high rates of recidivism. That could be dramatically improved with changes to the system but those changes aren't made, at least in part, because "people have free will and can just choose not to do crime".
As someone said a few pages ago: we take away people's driver's licenses when they have too many DUIs or too many traffic violations. Why do we do that? Because human behavior is predictable and based on a relatively small amount of information it's easy to predict that someone who drinks and drives is going to keep drinking and driving.
If we just assume that human behavior is unpredictable and it's impossible to guess what someone will do in the future then we can just throw away psychology, anthropology, and sociology.
If you assume that humans are only unpredictable because we don't have enough data or sufficiently powerful data-crunching apparatus then we can keep striving toward that point and maybe, eventually, improve the aspects of life that can be improved via prediction of human behavior.
I also don't understand your statement about "barely aware automatons". Deterministically-behaving humans are as aware as anything in the known universe.
Nothing you said above has anything to say about whether or not free will exists.
You are simply describing different interpretations of 'how free' your will is. Is it strongly informed by your history, or weakly informed? Neither of those have anything to say about free will in absolute, just in terms of how much 'energy' is required to produce an unpredictable result in a human.
GROUP human behavior is predictable, individual human behavior far less so. And again, thats because as things get bigger, and more loosely defined randomness becomes less influential.
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If you don't like pain I got a seemingly permanent solution to the problem. It might hurt a bit to start but then you probably won't feel pain ever again. I mean you won't feel anything else, but no more pain either.
I think that the concept of 'free will' is fundamental to the existence of all societies, human or animal. Sure, a deer might not be able to explain to you that it believes it has free will, but I think that a deer goes through life making real, unpredictable choices informed by its history. Will it dodge the car left, or right? Will it eat some grass, or go look for some leaves on a bush? Here comes a wolf, should it run with the herd, or strike out alone? What it does is informed by its past, but it is never UTTERLY predictable in its action. Sure, we can set up situations where one decision is so obviously awful that the deer will never make it (Should I leap into this lava pit, or go over there and eat those fresh blades of grass at a safe distance) but that doesn't mean the deer isn't making decisions.
I don't think non-determinism implies the existence of free will, and I don't really agree with your interpretation of quantum mechanics as it applies to macro-systems above the quantum level.
Above the level of quantum mechanics, things appear to happen deterministically. A ball will always bounce off a hard wall, no matter how many times I throw it.
"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!".
Free will adds nothing to any of this except now everything you think and do is 100% your own fault even if you have a brain tumor, veins full of drugs, and a horrible past.
Free will is just guilt and ego mythologized.
This is like provably false. Eventually the ball will work it's way through the wall, and as you keep throwing you definitely won't be able to predict the exact bounce back.
Like there's a reason we still cheer in the control room when a rocket makes it off the planet, because there's so many factors at play that even if we did all the newtonian math right the thing might just fail and explode because the results aren't absolutely predictable.
And i definitely don't have the patience to run around in circles for another 20 pages or however long it takes.
Have fun you all, i'm out.
Ok but none of that involves quantum nondeterminism, just that things aren't always consistent because there are an insane number of factors at play, which holds even in a deterministic universe.
I'm saying that there is no way for the ball to quantum tunnel through the wall like an electron may quantum tunnel out of a transistor.
"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!".
The joke is that there is no reason to care even if that were not true. People have repeatedly pointed out that the existence of "free will" is not enough to save meaning.
Free will does not rule out casualty playing a role, it rules out causality being 100% responsible.
I know of few morality scales where "i was drunk" is an acceptable explanation for all behaviors.
All moral scales assign fault for action to the being carrying them out. Many make space for causal forces beyond our control. A tumor affecting decision making adversely, a horrible past affecting your decision making, the context and immediate causal forces at play in the action being reviewed morally. These are all parts of morality scales that include free will conceptually. Like extenuating circumstances is a thing we acknowledge morally.
Actually it is.
Sure in the vastness of existence we are insignificant dust with little true meaning. However we can take meaning of our own amongst ourselves and that's enough to justify caring about the dust at least a little bit.
If it's all super complex dominoes. I can't even take meaning and enforce it. Any meaning, or a distinct lack of it, is forced upon us.
Yes that insane number of factors we can just barely fathom, can't measure until after it has resolved, and definitely can't predict... yeah that's as supernatural a space as free will or the soul. What's it matter what you call that space?
No, it will not. Do it enough times, and even by your standards you will eventually be wrong. Sometimes that ball will just pass straight through that wall without interacting with it. Swoosh. Now, you might need to throw that ball at the wall continuously for a trillion times the possible age of the universe for that to happen, but it WILL happen eventually. Does this seem counter-intuitive and impossible? Congratulations! Welcome to our quantum universe.
More realistically in your ball example, do you believe the ball will come off the wall with the EXACT same trajectory every time? With the EXACT same angular momentum? Because it absolutely will not, even if you throw it at the same point on the wall. The wall and the ball both have varying roughness, rigidity and toughness down to the atomic level on their surfaces. Those properties all CHANGE continuously in their exact values as the surface of the ball and wall continuously warp and shift. The ball might come off that wall with a slightly different angular momentum, or at a slightly different velocity vector. This might then cause you to drop the ball when you wouldn't before.
To make it easier to understand. Imagine that instead of throwing a ball at a wall, you are firing a proton at the wall. You cannot predict, regardless of how accurately you aim or target that proton, the EXACT angle that its going to come off at. When you fire that single proton, maybe it will go right through, or MAYBE it will bounce back, hit you in a neuron in the brain and cause that neuron to die which will slightly change the 'recollection strength' of the memories that neuron had. And suddenly YOU (A macroscopic object) are making a different decision because of the interaction between a proton and a virtual proton. Or even the interaction between a proton and a W boson if you fire that particle with enough speed.
Or, for a more realistic example. Imagine you are standing outside minding your own business. Oh no! Here comes a neutrino from space! Its a 100 PeV neutrino, so the flux of them is very low even on long timescales. You've probably only had a few hundred of them pass through you in your lifespan without interacting. Here it comes.... OH SHIT! It just randomly hit you! And oh no, it got you RIGHT IN THE DNA in a cell in your brain, and at an exact point which is bad for your cancer repair cells. Now you have cancer. And you have cancer thanks to quantum mechanics governing interactions between neutrinos and other particles. It could have hit you anywhere, it could have missed you completely. In fact, billions of years ago, it could have literally gone a different way. In double fact, because no-one measured it (or possibly could have, because no-one knew it was there) until it hit you and deposited its energy and it passed between two stars a few hundred light years ago, it wasn't even 100% on course to hit you until it did, it existed as a probability distribution hundreds of light years across and only became 'single valued' for a very brief time when it hit you.
These sort of interactions can modify crystal growth patterns and cloud formation and all sorts of things all the time, and they are always truly random. Perhaps it rains a few seconds later and a deer goes a different way around a tree and hits your car. Perhaps the crystal grain formations in a steel blade take a different shape, and a sword shatters when it hits a shield 10 years later along the exact grain pattern which wouldn't have been there
The universe is STRICTLY non deterministic. It is not deterministic at any level, for any object, at any time. It is only deterministic for sufficiently large objects at sufficiently short times being described in sufficiently simple ways. "Exactly what will Jephery be thinking about in 7562 seconds?" is not sufficiently large, or sufficiently short, or sufficiently simple. It is chaotic, and the answer to that question being chaotic makes humans chaotic.
The universe is no more deterministic that it is made up of a turtle flying through space with the world on its back. It is no more deterministic than the stars are just holes in the sky that the light shines through.
You can't take meaning and enforce it, because that is not a thing that makes sense. We assign meaning. And we don't need free will to do it.
what does meaning being forced upon us even mean, and why is that the case of we lack "free will"? (You have yet to give a comprehensive definition of "free will" btw. It is still super unclear what it is you think we should be having here.)
There is no true meaning
The only meaning that exists is the subjective meaning we experience
We do not choose that meaning because the meaning is the result of an entirely deterministic environment. Any meaning we experience is forced upon us.
Yes we assign meaning as part of the deterministic process, but again that assignment is forced upon us.
ok what is meaning though? why is it relevant whether determinism is true?
Yes. And it's pretty rad that I love to fluff kittens because of *colliding galaxies.*
Oh I thought we got past this determinism is no more truth than Catholicism. It's a philosophical concept I am just as free to ignore. You're coming up with an explanation for a gap we do not entirely fathom, and definitely can't currently prove out. (Last i checked westworld was sci fi)
I'm currently granting the point it is true and running to the conclusions it seemingly comes to in a moral context.
no I mean I do not see the difference determinism being true or not makes to what meaning is. You are free to ignore it, but you have to explain why rejecting it suddenly grants "meaningful" meaning or whatever.
like if it's all super complex dominoes, to me meaning remains the same.
That's fine and dandy for you but I spent my childhood bouncing from horror to horror and it leads me to some ends that are decidedly amoral. Should I just embrace those base behaviors and not force myself to build a moral framework to work within? Like if I seemingly, by a nature i'm consistently at odds with, a terrible person... why should I stop myself from being as such? I mean it's not like I can truly be held responsible for my actions (you just went over how free will makes everything 100% your fault, you understand the concept of hold responsible), and I definitely don't need to give a shit about the feelings of my fellow dominoes because I barely give a shit about my feelings. Is there any reason to give a shit. So what if I murder a guy? That was always going to happen and you can't really ever put it on me that I did it because I barely exist and am just the result of unstoppable causal forces.
The fact that, technically, the ball can go through the wall by means of every particle in the ball simultaneously tunneling across the wall isn't terribly relevant, though. Technically the ball can go through the wall. Or the ball and the wall could abruptly cease the exist as a ball and a wall and become a gas of their component atoms, or a badger wearing a fez. But the ball will never go through the wall or become a be-fezed badger because the probability of those things happening is so extraordinarily low that throwing the ball at the wall a trillion times is not event the thought of a drop in a bucket the size of an ocean.
Yes, the universe is fundamentally non-deterministic. But at any scale above small collections of atoms the reality of probabilistic processes means that the universe works as if it were purely deterministic. All the air in my house could abruptly be concentrated in one bathroom, leaving me to asphyxiate in hard vacuum, but the number of states where I asphyxiate is so small compared to the number where I don't that I'd have to wait significantly longer than the expected lifetime of the universe for it to happen.
But let's say that neuron action potentials are sufficiently small systems that single electrons tunneling between states has a meaningful impact, and that the action of a single neuron is sufficient to modify the behavior of a human for the sake of argument.
How does that imply free will?
It seems like that's actually the opposite of free will. Random quantum system behavior impacting human behavior seems to imply that our behavior is both non-deterministic and not self-determined. Whether you choose option A or B is the same as whether or not a passing cosmic ray gives you cancer. "You" don't decide A or B, the universe just picks one randomly and arbitrarily. Now your consciousness is a set of dominoes where occasionally one of said dominoes falls in the wrong direction on its own for literally no reason.
Which is actually also how computers work. ECC RAM exists beacuse a sufficient density of physical bits is essentially certain to have a bit randomly flipped by cosmic ray interaction. So I guess a computer without ECC RAM has free will?
Theoretically I suppose it does.
If it randomly fails, seemingly of its own volition, i'm gonna assign responsibility for the fault on the computer like it was a person. Especially if it is an entirely un reproducable event.
Like i work qa, and i've definitely talked to my system like it's a person on multiple occasions because it wont fail the way it just failed again and there's seemingly no explanation for the one off failure.
But again, and before you go and act on those impulses, we don't live in Domino universe. Your actions are NOT pre-determined.
However, I do agree with Sleep here. If we lived in a deterministic universe our 'beliefs' are no more real and important than those of Sephiroth in FF7. We are just mechanical dolls moving along a precisely determined track. Whether you kill someone is 100% as determined in advance as whether or not the sun will come up. Killer Sleep was just as 'guilty of murder' a billion years before he was born as he was while he was holding the knife.
How can a moral framework exist if the universe does not allow for change? Sure, I'm not saying that if you believe the universe is deterministic that you should go rampage through the streets (because, you will still feel your feelings and believe you made a choice even if you didn't) but if you DO rampage through the streets there was never anything you or anyone could ever have done to stop it. Nothing can possibly influence anything.
Whether or not you're a bad person and do bad things has surprisingly little to do with the existence of free will.
Whether or not the universe is deterministic we, both individually and as a society of interacting individuals, experience the world as if we had free will.
If human behavior is functionally deterministic, meaning that a sufficiently advanced reasoning system with sufficient knowledge could accurately predict human behavior accurately close enough to 100% of the time that the failure rate is functionally meaningless, then that does not actually change whether or not existing moral, ethical, and jurisprudence systems are correct. That advanced reasoning system, even if it can exist , does not currently exist so we can't base our morality on it.
If a hypothetical system could have prevented the chain of events which leads to you murdering a person and it did not then yes, the responsibility for that murder falls on the system that failed to prevent it. But no such system exists and so the responsibility falls on the murderer. And that responsibility exists because our society functions best when we don't let people murder one another willy-nilly.
There is no reason why society 'should' continue to function well or why we 'should' not all just kill one another and/or ourselves and make humanity cease to exist. The existence of society being inherently 'better' than it not existing implies the existence of a value scale entirely independent from humanity itself.
In regards to the bolded, we don't need to 'say' that. Its an absolute truth that you have truly random interactions every day and that your behavior is hugely influenced by them. The ball will come off the wall on a random path. The proton might bounce back. The neutrino might hit you in the brain. The rain might come 1 second earlier. The crystal structure might be different. The universe experiences continuous true randomness at the macro scale.
But, to be clear quantum mechanics does not imply free will, it just means that the trivial argument that free will does not exist (Domino universe) doesn't work, and we need to have a more complex discussion about whether we have free will.
Dominos don't have free will is an easy statement to make. No possible definition of free will is compatible with domino universe. If perfect classical mechanics was true, then we DONT have free will.
People making decisions informed by past experience, but in a way which has true unpredictability even when exposed to identical external inputs don't have free will is much harder to prove and requires a detailed discussion of what free will even is. Quantum mechanics IS true, and is important all the time, and so MAYBE we have free will, depending on what free will.
Ok but Sephiroth does not actually have beliefs. But the realness of my beliefs is not in question, regardless of their origin. We are aware mechanical dolls.
Are we really or is that awareness the unfortunate echo of dominoes falling
No, in a deterministic universe you believe you are an aware mechanical doll. Time doesn't exist in a deterministic universe in a relevant way (there is only 1 state of the universe which defines all times, and nothing can ever influence it). You and Sephiroth are identical. Simply following along a path you can never change. Saying words that you will always say. Thinking thoughts that you would always think.
If Sephiroth said, "I am a real person with real beliefs, I am an aware mechanical doll", would you believe him?
? This is as nonsensical as asking whether that awareness is just molecules interacting. regardless of their origin. being an echo of falling dominoes does not make us not really aware.
the realness of our awareness is not in question. it is a given. it is literally our point of interaction with the world. not being mindless automatons is a founding principle of philosophy.
But being mindless automatons working on nothing but the forces that propel us is the central principal of this determinism.
Let me preface by saying that I agree with you about the fundamental unpredictability of the universe.
I'm pretty sure the bold part is not actually true. A single proton or electron will elastically scatter in a truly random direction but a macro-scale ball will follow a predictable trajectory a sufficiently large percentage of the time as to be functionally "always". Bouncing an actual ball off an actual wall looks random because balls aren't perfect spheres, walls aren't perfect planes, and your hand is a fantastically shitty mechanism to reliably impact the same force on a system repeatedly. Given a sufficiently spherical ball, a sufficiently flat wall, and a sufficiently accurate throwing mechanism, I'm pretty sure I could reliably predict its post-bounce trajectory 99.enough-9's-I'm-calling-it-100% of the time.
That said, the appearance of randomness in what direction the ball goes when you throw it at the wall is a good metaphore for why I think the concept of "free will" is still meaningful in a hard-deterministic, 'domino' universe.
It doesn't matter that a sufficiently accurate simulation could accurately predict the trajectory of the ball because, when you throw it, you don't have one of those on hand. The best you can do is guess roughly which way it will bounce.
The fact that in a hard-deterministic universe all human actions are technically predictable does not change the experiential life of any individual human. Humans, if the universe were deterministic but otherwise indistinguishable from our own, still feel free-willed. And lacking the simulation hardware to prove otherwise it is the only rational, functional choice to base your moral system on that experience of free will.
For a very weird definition of "mindless automaton", yes.
I both believe the universe is inherently non-determinstic and that human behavior is inherently deterministic. In the sense that we are meat machines following a sort of programming, yes, we are 'mindless automata'.
However, we are mindless automata who experience our own existence as though we were mindful and free-willed.
I don't think that "free will" exists any more than the color red exists. The color red is what we have chosen to call a certain portion of the EM spectrum for purely functional reasons. Red "exists" because it is useful to us to have the idea of and name for it. It has no inherent meaning or value divorced from its import in the human experience. Without humans, red would not exist in any meaningful sense. Yet we clearly experience redness daily and trying to claim that because it's something invented by humans and entirely contained within the sphere of human experience is a useless distinction.
We experience our own existence as if we were free willed. Because we have no system which accurately predicts our predictable behavior, that predictability is meaningless.
Right so like ive been saying, hard determinism is essentially morally bankrupt.
Like if you try to build a moral framework within it, in a way that fully defies free will or unpredictability (if those words for it make you feel better), you end up with nothing.
No one's doing bad stuff and you can't assign even .01% of responsibility on anything but the universe itself. We are nothing more than mindless automatons that somehow think they are more.
To build any morality system where we are responsible for our actions you've got to say there's a free will (even if you just call it unpredictably because you dislike the words free will). Even if you admit "given perfect knowledge we could definitely predict everything and free will is a lie" you have to just drop it, treat people like they have real choices, and continue on with a morality system that places at least limited responsibility for action on the being performing the action.
Even if you have stumbled upon some kind of universal truth here it is totally useless because you can't base any kind of ethos or philosophy on it because it's like first implication is that we are barely aware atomatons acting on a determined path.
A 'sufficiently round ball' is literally forbidden from existing by the rules of quantum mechanics. Balls dont exist with a nice neat surface. They are continuously changing probability distributions with continuously morphing surfaces, densities, and rigidities. No device exists which can move one on an 'accurate path' because the concept of an 'accurate path' is not a real thing which exists. No wall can exist which is flat and so on. Yes, perhaps with a big ball, a flattish wall, and a person who is relatively good at catching the 'causality chain' will (on a human timescale) always look like this
Human throws ball at wall
Ball bounces back
Human catches ball
But, as I detailed above thats only because this causality chain is full of massive objects, short timescales, and low energy interactions. You're 99.99 etc % chance is only so big because you've set up the experiment to be so short timescale, low energy and simply defined. Maybe the human has to catch the ball 1 cm lower sometimes, and suddenly we're exposed to chaos again. Now, with balls bouncing off walls there is a MASSIVE pseuodorandom component too, where the ball looks like it bounced randomly, but actually that is because the ball is an oval, not round by simple measurement but there's still a quantum true random component too.
Have that same human fire a single proton at the wall and suddenly we have immediate chaos in the causality chain. Immediate true quantum mechanics chaos.
Human fires proton
Who the goose knows what happens? I don't know, probably it goes through? But, theres a solid chance it comes back too.
Probability distributions exist. Physical objects as we perceive them to be do not.
I disagree.
Acting as though people have free will isn't the same as believing that people have free will.
We act as though humans actions are unpredictable to the extent that it is more useful than doing otherwise and with the understanding that we should do otherwise as the opportunity presents itself.
Look at the American correctional system as an example.
It is morally bankrupt and abominable precisely because it treats free will as a real thing and pretends that human behavior is unpredictable.
The way that the prison system works and the way that ex-cons re-enter life can be very easily shown to lead to high rates of recidivism. That could be dramatically improved with changes to the system but those changes aren't made, at least in part, because "people have free will and can just choose not to do crime".
As someone said a few pages ago: we take away people's driver's licenses when they have too many DUIs or too many traffic violations. Why do we do that? Because human behavior is predictable and based on a relatively small amount of information it's easy to predict that someone who drinks and drives is going to keep drinking and driving.
If we just assume that human behavior is unpredictable and it's impossible to guess what someone will do in the future then we can just throw away psychology, anthropology, and sociology.
If you assume that humans are only unpredictable because we don't have enough data or sufficiently powerful data-crunching apparatus then we can keep striving toward that point and maybe, eventually, improve the aspects of life that can be improved via prediction of human behavior.
I also don't understand your statement about "barely aware automatons". Deterministically-behaving humans are as aware as anything in the known universe.
since we are in the realm of pure theory, i'd like to hear your response to this:
if you take one atom of xenon and add one newton of force to it, then you do the exact same thing again 1 second later so that the only difference in the two experiments is time, and there are no other physical stimuli at all interacting with this atom of xenon are you saying that you believe the two atoms of xenon will act differently?
if this is what you are saying, then you are effectively saying a + a = 2a in one circumstance but in the identical circumstance, a + a =/= 2a. in which case, i have no idea what you are saying.
if you agree with me that the xenon would do the same thing in both instances, then all you are saying is we cannot yet understand and calculate for all the possible physical stimuli that act on these 100 atoms of xenon. in which case i would say, that's not free will, that's just a math problem.
Being able to see the outcome (the predictions) means you can't do anything to improve it or change it.
Nothing you said above has anything to say about whether or not free will exists.
You are simply describing different interpretations of 'how free' your will is. Is it strongly informed by your history, or weakly informed? Neither of those have anything to say about free will in absolute, just in terms of how much 'energy' is required to produce an unpredictable result in a human.
GROUP human behavior is predictable, individual human behavior far less so. And again, thats because as things get bigger, and more loosely defined randomness becomes less influential.