A Strange Conception of Free Will

(Mar 2, 2017 03:47 AM)Secular Sanity Wrote: Will you read this and tell me what you think?

Howdy there Secsan.
I like the word because it's short and classic.
Here's a try concerning the request.   Everything's on a space-time continuum of dependency.  There's only "mandatory."

(Mar 2, 2017 06:07 AM)Syne Wrote: Since Coyne seems to just dismiss scientifically demonstrated indeterminism, e.g. "And even molecular quantum effects, which probably don’t even affect our acts, can’t possibly give us conscious control over our behavior", I'm not sure how he can make a strong argument for determinism.

If I challenge you to pick one and then while only half way though it pick the other, would I have determined your choice? Maybe I wasn't free to make the challenge, but neither would you have been free to refuse it. If you flip a coin, was your choice deterministic? How can deterministic causes result in probabilistic outcomes?

Am I Unsophisticated About Free Will?

Sean Carroll on Free Will

"Physicist Sean Carroll has picked up the gauntlet dropped by Massimo and me, and has a nice post up on Cosmic Variance about determinism and its connection with free will: "On determinism."  Sean, of course, knows a ton more about physics than either of us, and his take is well worth reading."

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(Mar 2, 2017 12:37 PM)elte Wrote: Howdy there Secsan.
I like the word because it's short and classic.
Here's a try concerning the request.   Everything's on a space-time continuum of dependency.  There's only "mandatory."

That's just what I thought you'd say, but people can change, right? What about external influences? Can that have an impact on your choices?

(Mar 2, 2017 02:29 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote: That's just what I thought you'd say, but people can change, right?  What about external influences?  Can that have an impact on your choices?

Indeed, all of those.  Everything is changing at least a tiny bit all the time, even if is just the vibration of constituent subatomic particles.

(Mar 2, 2017 05:56 AM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: I know, I talk philosophy like Einstein talked sports. Here's my take on determinism.

Like hindsight, determinism is perfect. IOW's in order to declare an event/action determined by causes external to the human will, the event has to first occur. The facts are laid out, if you want to blame Gods, the Big Bang or a person for causing it then do so. However what happens when I don't know or can't possibly know the end result of a cause?

Here's an example of where it breaks down IMHO. Known fact that impaired drivers kill people. After a while a law is passed prohibiting impaired operation of a motor vehicle. Later on statistics prove that deaths due to impaired drivers decreased by 50%. We know who was killed (determined) but we don't know who was saved (undetermined). Who among us can say with absolute certainty that they are alive because drunk driving laws have lessened the amount fatalities? 

There are causes with unknown results. 

Institutions can set up standards which establish when a claim is fit enough evidence-wise that it is no longer vulnerable to underdetermination (in the context of their system). However, the standard itself might have chinks in it which its creators weren't developed or bright enough in their era to conceive of or anticipate.

Yet still, the potential inability of humans to descriptively explain some items adequately or assign causes perfectly to events and things doesn't mean that the universe itself has a similar problem of loose ends or in tying them up. But neither can that be validated, either.

For instance, a claim like: "There are no anomalies in the universe, everything is caused or obeys the laws of physics or falls within the parameters of some principle"...

... That can't be empirically proven. Because no team of researchers can be at every spatiotemporal coordinate in the history of the world (both macro and micro levels) and observe with either bare senses or the aid of instruments to verify that there are indeed zero anomalous events. (Not to mention whether a belief that they would even possess all the ideas and criteria for sufficiently qualifying something as either a legitimate "norm" or an aberration could be justified.)

A conviction that the universe conforms without flaw to quantitative generalizations (is fully deterministic) is inferred, it's a product of rational thinking that coughs up arguments that "reality MUST be totally coherent or comprehensive in that way due to yata, yata, yata reasons" and flimsily appeals to past regularities. To an incredibly tiny number of tests conducted for affirming that there are no deviations from _X_ (incredibly tiny and local compared to the countless occurrences and circumstances in the staggeringly vast cosmos abroad since its origin billions of years ago).

The whole issue might seem passé in some corners, but the contended "randomness" sported in quantum physics isn't necessary a slam-dunk for culling out deterministic POVs. Since some interpretations do give that back to the enterprise.

MAX TEGMARK: In the early 20th century the theory of quantum mechanics revolutionized physics by explaining the atomic realm, which does not abide by the classical rules of Newtonian mechanics. Despite the obvious successes of the theory, a heated debate rages about what it really means. The theory specifies the state of the universe not in classical terms, such as the positions and velocities of all particles, but in terms of a mathematical object called a wave function. According to the Schrödinger equation, this state evolves over time in a fashion that mathematicians term "unitary," meaning that the wave function rotates in an abstract infinite-dimensional space called Hilbert space.

Although quantum mechanics is often described as inherently random and uncertain, the wave function evolves in a deterministic way. There is nothing random or uncertain about it. The sticky part is how to connect this wave function with what we observe. Many legitimate wave functions correspond to counterintuitive situations, such as a cat being dead and alive at the same time in a so-called superposition. In the 1920s physicists explained away this weirdness by postulating that the wave function "collapsed" into some definite classical outcome whenever someone made an observation. This add-on had the virtue of explaining observations, but it turned an elegant, unitary theory into a kludgy, nonunitary one. The intrinsic randomness commonly ascribed to quantum mechanics is the result of this postulate. Over the years many physicists have abandoned this view in favor of one developed in 1957 by Princeton graduate student Hugh Everett III. He showed that the collapse postulate is unnecessary. Unadulterated quantum theory does not, in fact, pose any contradictions. Although it predicts that one classical reality gradually splits into superpositions of many such realities, observers subjectively experience this splitting merely as a slight randomness, with probabilities in exact agreement with those from the old collapse postulate. --Parallel Universes ... Scientific American, May 2003

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(Mar 1, 2017 03:01 PM)stryder Wrote: Therefore the conclusion: Freewill and Predetermination both exist, neither is absolute as both are required.

That's my private belief orientation. But if I'll cater to this or that popular belief on a science board (that's wandering into philosophy) just to hop on its wagon and see what destination it lumbers off to or the number / variety of places it visits.

(Mar 2, 2017 08:06 PM)C C Wrote:

(Mar 1, 2017 03:01 PM)stryder Wrote: Therefore the conclusion:  Freewill and Predetermination both exist, neither is absolute as both are required.

That's my private belief orientation. But if I'll cater to this or that popular belief on a science board (that's wandering into philosophy) just to hop on its wagon and see what destination it lumbers off to or the number / variety of places it visits.

You’re a compatibilist then, right , C C?

So, for you the question isn’t "Am I free?" it’s "How much control do I have?"
Am I right?

Stryder, are you a compatibilist, too?

Personally, I find that the compatibilist/incompatibilist distinction doesn't cover enough philosophical territory. Incompatibilists deny that either free will, determinism, or both (indeterminists) exist. Compatibilists just redefine free will in a way that effectively makes it meaningless. Denying that free will, determinism, or indeterminism exist seems like a false dilemma. Classical physics demonstrates determinism, and quantum physics demonstrates indeterminism, each within their own domains. To deny either seems foolish, and to deny that either is universally applicable is equally so. Our everyday experience seems to demonstrate free will. And if our agency were moot, why would anyone fret over any choice to the extent that they should have physiological reactions or consequences?

Why can't metaphysical freewill exist (libertarianism) and be expressed through a physical (determined and/or stochastic) emergence?

(Mar 5, 2017 02:04 AM)Secular Sanity Wrote:

(Mar 2, 2017 08:06 PM)C C Wrote:

(Mar 1, 2017 03:01 PM)stryder Wrote: Therefore the conclusion: Freewill and Predetermination both exist, neither is absolute as both are required.

That's my private belief orientation. But if I'll cater to this or that popular belief on a science board (that's wandering into philosophy) just to hop on its wagon and see what destination it lumbers off to or the number / variety of places it visits.

You’re a compatibilist then, right , C C?

Compatibilism comes into play for me when determinism is selected as being the case or the cause of problems for free will.

To clarify a bit the brief reply to Stryder...

I consider philosophy of time as having a role which I factor into free will. In terms of personal opinions (setting my "What game are we playing today?" flexibility aside), I reject presentism. By itself alone, I also reject possibilism because it seems to be conjuring out of nothing the new additions to its block of the past. But I have some problems with eternalism. So that I usually wind-up with a hybrid of possibilism and eternalism. Potentially sporting something like determinism in one respect but indeterminism in another. Thus my comment about relating to or sympathizing with Stryder's conclusion.

(Mar 5, 2017 03:38 AM)Syne Wrote: Personally, I find that the compatibilist/incompatibilist distinction doesn't cover enough philosophical territory. Incompatibilists deny that either free will, determinism, or both (indeterminists) exist. Compatibilists just redefine free will in a way that effectively makes it meaningless. Denying that free will, determinism, or indeterminism exist seems like a false dilemma. Classical physics demonstrates determinism, and quantum physics demonstrates indeterminism, each within their own domains. To deny either seems foolish, and to deny that either is universally applicable is equally so. Our everyday experience seems to demonstrate free will. And if our agency were moot, why would anyone fret over any choice to the extent that they should have physiological reactions or consequences?

Why can't metaphysical freewill exist (libertarianism) and be expressed through a physical (determined and/or stochastic) emergence?

"The problem of free will is one of the oldest, the most significant, and the most intriguing issue of philosophy."

"The discussion started by St. Augustine occupied the greatest minds including Father of the Church himself, Epictetus, Rene Descartes, Xavier Bichat, Blaise Pascal, David Hume, Thomas Hobbes, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Henry Stapp, Roger Penrose, and many others. A quick analysis of their works, however, creates some kind of a continuum—a story structured by an evolutionary pattern.  It emerges very clearly from views of the listed philosophers, especially Schopenhauer’s, Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s.  While Schopenhauer was arguing the world to be the will itself—in other words—it is filled in by the will, in his theory Nietzsche went a step further by extracting human purposes and acts as the actual matter of the world from Schopenhauer’s model.  Nietzsche’s will to power was then rejected by Heidegger who was afraid of the destructive power of such ideology.  Instead, he proposed his own counter-argument to the metaphysics of will:  Gelassenheit, with likely translations of "being allowed to be" and "quiet expectation", and which is Heidegger’s solution to acquire the truth about being."

—Peter Ulric Tse

The love story that I posted, it’s beautiful because we see it as a gift, a gift to him, and a gift to her, but what is it really about?  Is it about control—a last effort—an exercise of freedom and constraint in a future that she can no longer take part in—no longer control?  Does it come from a place of fear, love, or both?

We all want more control, Syne.  It’s important for me to know my limits of how much, if any, I'm allowed.  I would like to believe that we can develop stronger levels of control over time.  That is, after all, what we all sense, isn't it?  That’s why I’m drawn towards Nietzsche’s ideas, and why I loved Peter Tse’s book so much, but at the same time, I also want to be free of self-deceit.  If free will is truly an illusion, I want to know, but we’re different, you and I.  You believe that there is an external entity beyond the universe and outside of time.  We all feel alienated and trapped in our own heads from time to time, and I could be wrong because Ben is rather obscure, and so this may be a bit presumptuous, but I get the impression that Ben, being more cynical than I, stands and remains at the outer edges.  

For me, it is important to know because the debate lies at the very heart of all of our beliefs, life itself, our interactions, and our reactions to the external and internal stimuli.  This is going to be difficult to explain, but please, bear with me. I feel that the fear of what is different or abnormal narrows our patterns of expectations and explanations, and that we can expand our subjective boundaries of constraints, and gain more freedom.

Peter Tse is sort of saying something similar.  He said that we seem to have these facts about the universe that are mental—the colors we see, the pain we feel, and yet we assume that under physicalism that these mental events must be realized in physical events presumably in neural activity, but the puzzle is how can mental events be causal in the universe when we assumes that physics is efficient to explain causation. So, if at a particle level, a description of reality is sufficient to account for each stage of events over time there’s no role for mental events at all.

In other words, he’s attempting to explain how mental events can be causal. He said that the idea is that neurons are doing something when they are making each other fire, and that realizes not just a physical causal chain of events of neurons making other neurons fire, but it’s realizing an informational causal chain of events, which to us can seem like a mental chain of events.  For example, if I want to understand architecture, the correct level of analysis is not a single brick, it’s the relationship among the bricks.  You can think of it as energy transfer and energy transformation.  Our brains are like little dot connecting devices.  My Neurons aren’t responding to the amount of input.  They’re responding to the patterns.  These patterns are the criteria. A mental act itself can change the criteria and reorganize the noise in the system. They're not just triggering each other to fire, they’re also, resetting the criteria for firing.  

Nietzsche didn’t believe in free will either.  In fact, he said that our inner world is full of phantoms and the "will" is one of them.  It accompanies events. He felt that there was no "self" in "self-mastery", that the "will", in other words, is itself a product of various unconscious drives.  His concept of the "will to power" is probably one of the most misunderstood ideas. "This world is the will to power—and nothing besides!  And you yourselves are the will to power—and nothing besides!"

For me, Nietzsche’s idea of "love of one’s fate', "eternal reoccurrence", and his "will to power" bridges the separation between cause and effect—the world and I.  It reduces the alienation, and the desperate attempt to dominate and enforce order where no order exists, i.e., (the whip), but at the same time, allows a certain level of expansion of the will.  No victory or defeat just part of a cycle with a proactive internal honesty and directness.  Bringing the whip, i.e., (our wisdom/our control), and yet by relaxing our ego, we can remove some of its censorship, and become a little more receptive to external stimuli that we might otherwise ignore.  He leans towards creativity rather than just adaptation and survival.  

In his dancing song, he thinks of life as a woman.  Life pretends to be envious of his wisdom and feared that his wisdom would cause a separation between them.  He whispered something into her ear and she said "Thou knowest that, O Zarathustra? That knoweth no one—. I think that he told her that he knew they were one in the same.  His wisdom was a part of life.  They became one.  He gazed into her eyes, they wept together, and then Life was dearer to him than all his Wisdom had ever been.  He submitted.

In mine, I think of life as a man.  In all of our relationships there is a pull and push—submission and control—actions and reactions.  "Rest and motion:  The dance of the universe, the essence of Life.  I gave myself to him again, oh—the sweet debt of time."

So, just like C C, Nietzsche felt that freedom existed within our destinies as the freedom to become who one is. 

We’re on a fast-moving train with no tracks, no destination, no railroad switch…
But we can still dance.

(Mar 5, 2017 02:04 AM)Secular Sanity Wrote: So, for you the question isn’t "Am I free?" it’s "How much control do I have?" Am I right?

I had to leave that for this later post since my first attempt to coordinate it together wasn't working out, and it was getting late (deleted the original longer reply as a result, for that brief one).

Emphasis on autonomy (of producing one's own decisions and acts without dependence upon an external puppeteer) and emphasis on identity, seems (for me) to be the only semantic flavor that might survive all or most of the venues which the issue of "free will" could be tossed into.

But my former insistence (in a conventional deterministic scenario addressed much earlier in the thread) upon a single version or history of one's brain/body constituting one's identity -- that probably has to be scrapped. Though it still applies in the determinism of a block-universe due to only having that single timeline of one's brain / body (it's just not necessary or extends prescriptively to all types of ontological circumstances which one might exist in).

Indeterminism and the "many worlds" tendencies of quantum determinism (exhibited by some interpretations of QM) would seem to require embracing the whole set of possible versions of a person as one's identity. Thus that apparently has to be surrendered to in order to be consistent across the variety of venues that the issue of free will could be injected into. This places yet more reliance upon the autonomy of a brain/body than on the specific version of "who I am" choosing or doing _X_.

A potential exception is if, in the context of some particular indeterminism scenario, there really was a generic self (i.e., consciousness actually does "move" so to speak) transiting from its brain in one pre-existing[1] optional configuration of the world to the next (thereby experiencing the traditional "flow" attributed to time). And it somehow literally "choosing" which optional configuration it wanted to travel to. In that case identity could be concentrated upon that migrating agency rather than being distributed or supervening upon the set of all possible versions of a person in the set of all possible configurations of the universe.[2]

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[1] Since, again, I personally reject presentism when not entertaining it for the sake of any "game" others are carrying out. For instance, in the overly simplistic block-universe view, my life would be a kind of four-dimensional "worm". The whole extra-dimensional extended "worm" entity would be the real or integrated me as opposed these ephemeral slices that I mistakenly take to be winking into existence and out of existence instant by instant. Accordingly, the sequence of decisions and actions I make along that worm are actually part of my being and identity (not just volition). But in the complexity of a "many worlds" branching type of block-universe or whatever (i.e., a quantum brand of determinism) my identity would seem to have to expand, again, to the set of all alternate versions of myself.

[2] As a very rough example via the quoted excerpts below... Remove Julian Barbour's requirement that [in his Platonia] it is the whole universe itself moving from one configuration to another (a competitive / probabilistic selection process choosing its path among all the possible states of the cosmos). And replace it with only an organism's "moving consciousness" which is transiting from one optional brain / body configuration to the next. I threw in the Hermann Weyl quote afterwards, too, to illustrate that -- even though it pertains to the older, conventional block-universe or spacetime depiction rather than Barbour's Platonia.

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JULIAN BARBOUR: "Plato... taught that the only real things are forms or ideas: perfect paradigms, existing in a timeless realm. In our mortal existence we catch only fleeting glimpses of these ideal forms. Now each point - each thing - in these 'countries' I have asked you to imagine could be regarded as a Platonic form. Triangles certainly are. I shall call the corresponding 'country' Platonia. The name reflects its mathematical perfection and timeless landscape. Nothing changes in Platonia. Its points are all the instants of time, all the Nows; they are simply there, given once and for all.

"[...] The proper way to think about motion is that the universe as a whole moves from one 'place' to another 'place', where 'place' means a relative arrangement, or configuration, of the complete universe. [...] It does not move in absolute space, it moves from one configuration to another. The totality of these places is its relative configuration space: Platonia. [...] no Sun rises or sets over that landscape to mark the walker's progress. The Sun, like the moving parts of any clock, is part of the universe. It is part of the walker...

"There is nothing outside the universe to time it as it goes from one place to another in Platonia - only some internal change can do that. But just as all markers are on an equal footing for defining position, so are all changes for the purposes of timing. [...] The history of the universe is the path. Each point on the path is a configuration of the universe. For a three-body universe, each configuration is a triangle. The path is just the triangles - nothing more, nothing less. With time gone, motion is gone..." --The End of Time


HERMANN WEYL: "The objective world simply IS, it does not HAPPEN. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the life line [worldline or "4D-worm"] of my body, does a certain section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time." --Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science

(Mar 5, 2017 10:33 AM)C C Wrote:

(Mar 5, 2017 02:04 AM)Secular Sanity Wrote:

(Mar 2, 2017 08:06 PM)C C Wrote:

(Mar 1, 2017 03:01 PM)stryder Wrote: Therefore the conclusion: Freewill and Predetermination both exist, neither is absolute as both are required.

That's my private belief orientation. But if I'll cater to this or that popular belief on a science board (that's wandering into philosophy) just to hop on its wagon and see what destination it lumbers off to or the number / variety of places it visits.

You’re a compatibilist then, right , C C?

Compatibilism comes into play for me when determinism is selected as being the case or the cause of problems for free will.

To clarify a bit the brief reply to Stryder...

I consider philosophy of time as having a role which I factor into free will. In terms of personal opinions (setting my "What game are we playing today?" flexibility aside), I reject presentism. By itself alone, I also reject possibilism because it seems to be conjuring out of nothing the new additions to its block of the past. But I have some problems with eternalism. So that I usually wind-up with a hybrid of possibilism and eternalism. Potentially sporting something like determinism in one respect but indeterminism in another. Thus my comment about relating to or sympathizing with Stryder's conclusion.

I don't see a singular timeline as being an accurate way for a universe to function.

Our internal perception (e.g. Our consciousness) tracks something that is deeply personal to us (i.e. Egocentric), while indeed we can at times share events that sculpture our perceived passage of time, we can also veer off and observe passages that are different from each other. Most of the time those differences aren't known unless we compare notes with each other from time to time about our observations.

At that point most of the differences between viewpoint often lead to the conclusion that someone's memory is slipping, not that they have observed and lived an alternative reality.
(Not of course to be mixed up with the "Trump as President, Alternative Reality" conspiracy)

Therefore to me it's not as simple as past-present-future, since it's actually an entwining string of events that interweaves with other strings to create the fabric of our reality.