(Mar 23, 2017 03:43 AM)Secular Sanity Wrote: And from your Wikipedia link: Fatalism, by referring to the personal "fate" or to "predestined events" strongly imply the existence of a someone or something that has set the "predestination." This is usually interpreted to mean a conscious, omniscient being or force who has personally planned—and therefore knows at all times—the exact succession of every event in the past, present, and future, none of which can be altered.
Fatalism is a broad category of denying free will. Even cherry-picking predestination, it's effectively indistinguishable from determinism.
Quote:I didn't misunderstand it.
They said:
Any explanation of what goes on in a specific individual observation of one photon has to take into account the whole experimental apparatus of the complete quantum state consisting of both photons, and it can only make sense after all information concerning complementary variables has been recorded. Our results demonstrate that the viewpoint that the system photon behaves either definitely as a wave or definitely as a particle would require faster-than-light communication. Because this would be in strong tension with the special theory of relativity, we believe that such a viewpoint should be given up entirely.
I said that there were some arguments against it, listed two of them, and then said I don't know, but it makes me uncomfortable.
There is no evidence against it, and no reason this should cast doubt on free will, since it's actually the deterministic view that a photon should behave in a definite way at all times.
Quote:I just don't think you're smarter than Jerry Coyne. Peter Tse was my last hope. I'm reading his book again and doing a lot of thinking. Something that you should be doing in regards to your views against homosexuality. That really makes me doubt anything and everything that you say.
Weak-minded people often do feel the need to appeal to authority, and their views are often shifted by the latest thing they read.
Luckily, I don't really care if you doubt what I say or not. Since I don't judge knowledge based on authority, I don't expect anyone to take anything I say as any sort of authority either.
My views are informed by actual science, not emotional and agenda driven mischaracterizations of the science.
(Mar 23, 2017 06:28 AM)Syne Wrote: My views are informed by actual science, not emotional and agenda driven mischaracterizations of the science.
That is fucking hilarious. You crack me up. You’re not thinking logically, nor are you Syne the science guy. You’re just stubborn, that’s all.
Let me think here for a minute. You totally fucked up on the Antonio Damasio Scientology connection, but you were pretty good with the stopped light paper, hmm. *strumming fingers*
Maybe we should stick with a Reader's Digest version, eh?
Answer this question that’s presented in this video, will you?
How can you believe in both things? How can you think that your actions are freely chosen while knowing that every effect has a cause, and that everything that happens now in the present is the necessary result of events that occurred in the past?
You could take C C’s position, and say that the action is determined—that is, it couldn’t not happen—but when the action is self-determined—or determined by internal causes—the action should be considered free, but you already said that compatibilists just redefine free will in a way that effectively makes it meaningless.
(Mar 23, 2017 06:28 AM)Syne Wrote: My views are informed by actual science, not emotional and agenda driven mischaracterizations of the science.
That is fucking hilarious. You crack me up. You’re not thinking logically, nor are you Syne the science guy. You’re just stubborn, that’s all.
Let me think here for a minute. You totally fucked up on the Antonio Damasio Scientology connection, but you were pretty good with the stopped light paper, hmm. *strumming fingers*
Apparently these forums mean a lot to you. I don't even remember what the "Antonio Damasio Scientology connection" may refer to. A quick search turned it up though, and you seemed to make a straw man out of him supposedly drawing "inspiration" from Dianetics, though I never even implied he had any knowledge of Dianetics. But go right ahead an imagine you made some valid point. God knows you need the validation. Unless it was fairly recent, it just doesn't matter enough to remember nonsense discussions with an anonymous nobody on the internet (you). I have a life.
You, on the other hand, seem to obsess over anonymous discussions on the internet months after they occurred.
Quote:How can you believe in both things? How can you think that your actions are freely chosen while knowing that every effect has a cause, and that everything that happens now in the present is the necessary result of events that occurred in the past?
You could take C C’s position, and say that the action is determined—that is, it couldn’t not happen—but when the action is self-determined—or determined by internal causes—the action should be considered free, but you already said that compatibilists just redefine free will in a way that effectively makes it meaningless.
Quantum indeterminacy may only serve to sever the causal connection to initial conditions, while not wholly driving will. Until superdeterminism can be demonstrated, our choice of measurement fundamentally alters quantum results, contributing to the view that free choice has fundamental physical results. The impossibility of nondestructive copying of quantum states, in order to simulate a mind, bars any significant prediction of the mind. And if there is such a thing as a universal wave function, each interaction and observation further collapses the probability of its initial state, perhaps allowing free choices to ultimately determine initial quantum conditions.
(Mar 23, 2017 07:19 PM)Syne Wrote: Unless it was fairly recent, it just doesn't matter enough to remember nonsense discussions with an anonymous nobody on the internet (you). I have a life.
You, on the other hand, seem to obsess over anonymous discussions on the internet months after they occurred.
I have a good memory. Don’t flatter yourself. Besides, you’re not what I’d call a reply friend. You’re more of an antagonist, if anything. Nothing more than a character in what Zinman called an interactive video game. I’m not braggadocios. So, I don’t really feel the need to defend my version of a "good life". I’m a Yes-sayer that’s all you need to know.
Quantum indeterminacy may only serve to sever the causal connection to initial conditions, while not wholly driving will. Until superdeterminism can be demonstrated, our choice of measurement fundamentally alters quantum results, contributing to the view that free choice has fundamental physical results. The impossibility of nondestructive copying of quantum states, in order to simulate a mind, bars any significant prediction of the mind. And if there is such a thing as a universal wave function, each interaction and observation further collapses the probability of its initial state, perhaps allowing free choices to ultimately determine initial quantum conditions.
You have a metaphysical concept of a being other than the natural world, right?
I know you’ve said that you have some sort of hybrid version, but how does that work for quantum behavior? Is it random, internally determined, externally determined, or determined by god?
I know you’ve said that you have some sort of hybrid version, but how does that work for quantum behavior? Is it random, internally determined, externally determined, or determined by god?
Do you think God is the hidden variable, Syne?
No, I just have a broader conception of "natural world". No part of panentheism alters quantum behavior. Stochastic processes are truly stochastic.
Indeterminate events interrupt causal determinism, making their results a new cause only probabilistically related to previous deterministic causes.
Another point to notice here is that the notion of things being determined thereafter is usually taken in an unlimited sense—i.e., determination of all future events, no matter how remote in time. But conceptually speaking, the world could be only imperfectly deterministic: things could be determined only, say, for a thousand years or so from any given starting state of the world. For example, suppose that near-perfect determinism were regularly (but infrequently) interrupted by spontaneous particle creation events, which occur only once every thousand years in a thousand-light-year-radius volume of space. This unrealistic example shows how determinism could be strictly false, and yet the world be deterministic enough for our concerns about free action to be unchanged.
- https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/
I know you’ve said that you have some sort of hybrid version, but how does that work for quantum behavior? Is it random, internally determined, externally determined, or determined by god?
Do you think God is the hidden variable, Syne?
No, I just have a broader conception of "natural world". No part of panentheism alters quantum behavior. Stochastic processes are truly stochastic.
Indeterminate events interrupt causal determinism, making their results a new cause only probabilistically related to previous deterministic causes.
Another point to notice here is that the notion of things being determined thereafter is usually taken in an unlimited sense—i.e., determination of all future events, no matter how remote in time. But conceptually speaking, the world could be only imperfectly deterministic: things could be determined only, say, for a thousand years or so from any given starting state of the world. For example, suppose that near-perfect determinism were regularly (but infrequently) interrupted by spontaneous particle creation events, which occur only once every thousand years in a thousand-light-year-radius volume of space. This unrealistic example shows how determinism could be strictly false, and yet the world be deterministic enough for our concerns about free action to be unchanged.
- https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/
Determinism often is taken to mean causal determinism, which in physics is known as cause-and-effect. It is the concept that events within a given paradigm are bound by causality in such a way that any state (of an object or event) is completely determined by prior states.
Physics, particularly 20th century physics, does have one lesson to impart to the free will debate; a lesson about the relationship between time and determinism. Recall that we noticed that the fundamental theories we are familiar with, if they are deterministic at all, are time-symmetrically deterministic. That is, earlier states of the world can be seen as fixing all later states; but equally, later states can be seen as fixing all earlier states. We tend to focus only on the former relationship, but we are not led to do so by the theories themselves.
Nor does 20th (21st) -century physics countenance the idea that there is anything ontologically special about the past, as opposed to the present and the future. In fact, it fails to use these categories in any respect, and teaches that in some senses they are probably illusory.[9] So there is no support in physics for the idea that the past is “fixed” in some way that the present and future are not, or that it has some ontological power to constrain our actions that the present and future do not have. It is not hard to uncover the reasons why we naturally do tend to think of the past as special, and assume that both physical causation and physical explanation work only in the past present/future direction (see the entry on thermodynamic asymmetry in time). But these pragmatic matters have nothing to do with fundamental determinism. If we shake loose from the tendency to see the past as special, when it comes to the relationships of determination, it may prove possible to think of a deterministic world as one in which each part bears a determining—or partial-determining—relation to other parts, but in which no particular part (region of space-time, event or set of events, ...) has a special, privileged determining role that undercuts the others. Hoefer (2002a) and Ismael (2016) use such considerations to argue in a novel way for the compatiblity of determinism with human free agency.
The key idea that separates the view from standard compatibilism is this. Once we free ourselves from certain misconceptions about time and physical law, we can correctly regard ourselves as the sources and determiners of our own free actions, and regard both facts toward the past, and toward the future, as influenced or affected by those choices and actions. But there is a great asymmetry in that influence. Our choices and actions normally have clearly visible, macroscopic consequences toward the future, but they "affect" past events, normally, only at an imperceptible microscopic level. The word 'affect' needs scare-quotes here because, toward the past, it is inappropriate to think of our free actions as causing things to happen in such-and-so ways; it is more accurate to say that, under determinism, our free actions place constraints on how past events may be, at a microscopic level. (Namely: they must be such as to be compatible with your action, given the constraints supplied by the deterministic laws.) Here is where it helps to keep in mind the time-symmetry of determinism and the Block Universe perspective in which the past is not ontologically different from, or privileged over, the present or future. Physics does not make us marionettes on "iron rails" of compulsion running from the past through the present and into the future; these (mixed) metaphors in fact have no place in a clear view of what science has taught us about the world. Cause-effect relations do typically run from past to future, but they are not usually deterministic and are emergent regularities which are, moreover, partially perspectival and context-dependent. The upshot is that physics does not force us to view ourselves as helplessly in the grip of the past facts plus physical laws.
Time? I don't know. I'll need some time to think about it.
I've thought about it and that's a terrible answer. Sean Carroll talks about the examples in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on causal determinism, but doesn’t find the examples impressive, and neither do I.
"A better question is, if we choose to think of human beings as collections of atoms and particles evolving according to the laws of physics, is such a description accurate and complete? Or is there something about human consciousness — some strong sense of “free will” — that allows us to deviate from the predictions that such a purely mechanistic model would make?
If that’s your definition of free will, then it doesn’t matter whether the laws of physics are deterministic or not — all that matters is that there are laws. If the atoms and particles that make up human beings obey those laws, there is no free will in this strong sense; if there is such a notion of free will, the laws are violated. In particular, if you want to use the lack of determinism in quantum mechanics to make room for supra-physical human volition (or, for that matter, occasional interventions by God in the course of biological evolution, as Francis Collins believes), then let’s be clear: you are not making use of the rules of quantum mechanics, you are simply violating them. Quantum mechanics doesn’t say “we don’t know what’s going to happen, but maybe our ineffable spirit energies are secretly making the choices”; it says “the probability of an outcome is the modulus squared of the quantum amplitude,” full stop. Just because there are probabilities doesn’t mean there is room for free will in that sense.
On the other hand, if you use a weak sense of free will, along the lines of “a useful theory of macroscopic human behavior models people as rational agents capable of making choices,” then free will is completely compatible with the underlying laws of physics, whether they are deterministic or not. That is the (fairly standard) compatibilist position, as defended by me in Free Will is as Real as Baseball. I would argue that this is the most useful notion of free will, the one people have in mind as they contemplate whether to go right to law school or spend a year hiking through Europe. It is not so weak as to be tautological: we could imagine a universe in which there were simple robust future boundary conditions, such that a model of rational agents would not be sufficient to describe the world. E.g. a world in which there were accurate prophesies of the future: “You will grow up to marry a handsome prince.” (Like it or not.) For better or for worse, that’s not the world we live in. What happens to you in the future is a combination of choices you make and forces well beyond your control — make the best of it!"
I agree with Sean Carroll, but as Peter Tse said, physics may not be the best avenue to understanding freewill. It may not lie within the objective world. It may lie within our subjective world.
To move; yes, we needed a brain to move, but to survive, we needed, not only our emotions and instincts, but our imagination, as well.
If we have any freewill at all, it lies within our imagination. If you want freewill, you might have to enter my girly-girl world of emotions, imagination, and creativity.
It involves the ability to not be driven by the stimulus, but to be driven by internal representations, and animals have evolved the ability to use working memory. The ability to deliberate and consider possible options is much more than simple reflexes. So, the heart of our freewill might lie within our imagination. The readiness potential is just sort of a red herring that lead the field astray, and is largely irrelevant to freewill. Freewill doesn’t reside in the domain of meaningless pseudorandom finger movements. It resides in the domain of the human imagination, considering our options, and playing things out, and that’s an entirely different brain process than preparing to make a meaningless motor action.
The brain is not a computer. The brain rewires itself. Algorithms are threads of decisions. There’s this input then there’s this yes or no decision, and then a single output. Whereas neurons are radically different from that. They’re taking in ten thousand inputs, integrating those, and then sending hundreds or thousands of inputs out. Humans have mental models. We’re not just taking input and processing it in a bottom up way. We have mental models of how things work, and we can use those mental models to operate, not only to operate in the world, but we can use those mental models in our internal, subjective, virtual reality to carry out operations, to play things out. I see nothing like that in any computer system now.
A tiger may have some sort of freewill, but he cannot choose to be a vegetarian. You, however, can choose to not have an anti-gay stance. You’re extremely stubborn. If you can change then there’s hope. I don’t know. We shall see.
I already addressed the naive assumptions of Sean Carrol, which fail to address the interaction between deterministic and indeterministic processes. There's no need to appeal to subjective emotional desires when you simply have to take ALL physics into account...instead of arbitrarily picking between classical and quantum.
Your opinion on the subject hasn't changed any more than mine, so quit pretending otherwise. Just because you make useless sounds about vacillating doesn't mean a thing unless you ever manage to change your mind. Have you ever been anything other than liberal? I was quite liberal in my ignorant, younger years. But your lack of experience with changing your mind on fundamental issues you identify with may account for your lack of ability to accept free will. But no one would expect you to believe it unless you had personally exercised it. Doing is believing.
(Mar 26, 2017 08:54 PM)Syne Wrote: I already addressed the naive assumptions of Sean Carrol, which fail to address the interaction between deterministic and indeterministic processes. There's no need to appeal to subjective emotional desires when you simply have to take ALL physics into account...instead of arbitrarily picking between classical and quantum.
No, my dear, you picked the most unrealistic answer available. Go figure. Probably because you painted yourself into a corner. Angry birds like to have corners to retreat to.
BTW, I'm not a liberal. I don't identify with any political party.
Mar 23, 2017 06:28 AM
But go right ahead an imagine you made some valid point. God knows you need the validation. Unless it was fairly recent, it just doesn't matter enough to remember nonsense discussions with an anonymous nobody on the internet (you). I have a life. 