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On 13 Sep 2009 10:37:19 -0400, Warp <war### [at] tag povrayorg> wrote:
> Ok, time for some philosophical tought.
IMO it matters not a jot if we have free will or not. My stance is that we
should act as if we do have free will. The other way of living is a good excuse
for bad behaviour, again IMO.
Of course our will is constrained by the laws of physics and of society which is
a good thing, mostly.
--
Regards
Stephen
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I chose to reply to this post. Theoretically my choice to do so is a
deterministic consequence of everything that has ever happened in my
life, up to and including reading this post.
I don't think choice is an illusion. I chose to type these words. Is
*free* choice an illusion? Well, define "free", define "illusion", and
then I'll get back to you. ;-)
I think people sometimes confuse "deterministic" with "predictable". The
weather is deterministic, and well-understood. And yet, after millennia
of trying, nobody can predict the weather. There are even strong
theoretical reasons for why this should be; in principle a result can
depend on the initial conditions with arbitrary sensitivity (and it
doesn't even need to be an especially complicated system for this to be
the case). Since if nothing else the uncertainty principle limits what
can actually be measured, there can exist events which are physically
impossible to predict, because the necessary measurements can never be
obtained.
I've read some authors prematurely stating that in the next decade or so
we will have computers with more computational power then the human
brain, and then we will be able to simulate brains, and even determine
what a person will do before they do it. This is of course nonesense.
Modern science has only the vaguest clue how the brain works, and you
can't simulate something you don't understand.
Also... I have a sore throat today.
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Sabrina Kilian wrote:
> Physics has not, as far as I know,
> proven that the universe is a completely deterministic place.
Um... wouldn't that be a non-falsifiable hypothesis?
You cannot *prove* that the universe is deterministic, or that it is
non-deterministic. If the universe is non-deterministic, then cause and
effect are unrelated and the very notion of "proof" is invalid. QED.
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Darren New wrote:
> When we launch Excel, have we deluded the computer into running a
> spreadsheet program? Or is it really, actually running Excel?
The computer is running a series of instructions to give the appearance
of running Excel.
--
~Mike
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Invisible wrote:
> Sabrina Kilian wrote:
>
>> Physics has not, as far as I know,
>> proven that the universe is a completely deterministic place.
>
> Um... wouldn't that be a non-falsifiable hypothesis?
No.
> You cannot *prove* that the universe is deterministic, or that it is
> non-deterministic. If the universe is non-deterministic, then cause and
> effect are unrelated and the very notion of "proof" is invalid. QED.
Not really. It depends on the ways in which it's nondeterministic. You can
still have cause and effect yet have some effects with essentially no cause.
If *nothing* is caused, then yes, cause and effect are unrelated.
Someone pointed out that the idea that "time" is a forth dimension in which
everything is static would mean there's really no cause and effect and
there's no reason for something 5 seconds from now to look anything like it
does now, but that's not *quite* true either.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".
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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Warp wrote:
> > The main (highly) philosophical problem with there not being true free
> > will nor true free choice is that it basically nullifies the entire
> > concepts of sentience, independence and individuality.
> If you agree there's a lack of "free will" in the dualistic sense, it of
> course destroys the dualistic concepts of sentience, independence, and
> individuality. I.e., if you define "free will" and "sentience" and
> "individuality" as supernatural, saying "the supernatural cause of free will
> is missing and thus the supernatural cause of sentience is also."
I cannot see any other possible definition of "free choice" than something
which transcends the physical world, in other words, something which can
break determinism in a non-random way, which basically breaks physics.
If we take the materialistic view (which, note, I'm not saying is wrong!)
that the human mind is purely physical and doesn't transcend the laws of
physics, I can see no other conclusion than that free choice does not exist,
but every "choice" is just a consequence of something else (which is mostly
a combination of both determinism and pure randomness). Of course these are
not choices at all, just consequences.
> > It's not you, a sentient being, a thinking individual, who is making the choices.
> Of course it is. I'm just not doing it through supernatural means.
No, your "choices" are simply consequences of previous events and sometimes
randomness. At its core, you are not different from an inanimate object which
gets moved by physical phenomena. The object is not "choosing" anything.
> > Not at the most basic level. It's just a result of deterministic
> > cause and effect and completely random unpredictable quantum fluctuations.
> Does a rock stop existing simply because its fall is a result of
> determinsitic gravity effects?
Who said anyting about existence? I was talking about free choice. A rock
doesn't choose what it does. It simply reacts to events in deterministic
(and sometimes random) ways. There's no higher conscience moving it.
If the human mind is bound to the exact same physics as the rock, then
the human mind is no different from the rock. It's not really a sentient,
independent being, but an inanimate object. Extremely complex, yes, but at
its core no different from the rock.
> > You may be deluded into thinking that you are making choices, when in fact
> > you aren't.
> Am I deluded into thinking that I'm thinking, then? I think, therefore I
> am? Who is deluded into thinking I'm making choices? Why can't I make
> choices deterministically?
> When we launch Excel, have we deluded the computer into running a
> spreadsheet program? Or is it really, actually running Excel?
You are not deluded into thinking that something happened even though it
didn't. You are deluded into thinking that it happened because you chose
for it to happen, rather than it happening just as a consequence of previous
events. If it happened as a consequence, it's not a choice.
--
- Warp
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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Warp wrote:
> > In the physical world as we know it, at macroscopic levels, every action
> > is deterministic:
> Not really. For example, you cannot play billiards without feedback. Because
> of the roundness of the balls, every tiny mistake is going to get amplified
> and magnified. By the time you've taken 15 shots, the accumulated
> uncertainty would be larger than the diameter of the cue ball. So if you
> tried to program a robot to play pool by dead reckoning, you're doomed to fail.
Mass and energy is quantized, and thus there's only a finite number of
ways the balls can act. It doesn't matter how many possibilities there are,
they are still finite.
Of course if we start measuring their physical properties at atomic
accuracy, we may end up having random variation due to quantum phenomena,
but that's exactly what I was saying in my original post.
> > Now we come to the philosophical concept of human free choice. By its
> > very definition free choice is necessarily something which transcends both
> > deterministic and random behavior. In other words, free choice can change
> > a deterministic chain of events non-randomly. Thus it overrides both
> > determinism at macroscopic levels and randomness at quantum levels.
> If that's how you define it, yes. I think you've defined yourself into a
> corner, tho.
I define it that way because I don't consider events which are simply a
consequence of deterministic and random events to be "making a choice".
They are consequences, not choices.
> I think the first problem comes from defining "free will" as being able to
> make a choice that's neither deterministic nor random. (I'd say "not
> deterministic but controllable" or something, perhaps.) This is a "mu" kind
> of question, because you haven't said what it means to make a choice.
What do you mean? Of course I did, and in a rather simple way at that:
Making a choice is changing a deterministic chain of events in a non-random
way.
In other words, a deterministic chain of events is affected, broken,
changed, resulting in a completely new chain of events which wouldn't have
happened if this choice hadn't been made, but this change was not due to
quantum (or any other unpredictable) randomness, but rather because of the
will of a sentient, intelligent being. This choice was not simply a
consequence of earlier events or quantum randomness. In other words, a
sentient being is not completely bound by the laws of physics, but can
affect outcomes in ways which are not determined by these laws.
Free choice is what would make sentient beings different from inanimate
objects. If we are completely bound to physics, then we are, at its core,
just inanimate objects with no true free will. Everything we do is just a
direct consequence of past events and quantum randomness. The chains of
events may be really, really complicated, but nevertheless just physical
consequences, not choices.
Of course I'm not saying that there's an inherent problem with that.
If I'm happy even knowing that my choices are just consequences, then what
does it matter? It's not like this knowledge would change my life in any way.
> Hence, in my take, if everything *were* deterministic, but still to
> complicated to predict what someone else might do, then that person has free
> will.
I find it a rather odd definition. "If the consequences are too complicated
to be predicted by us, then it's free will acting there."
That means that what constitutes free will would change over time, as our
ability to predict physical events gets increased.
--
- Warp
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Stephen <mcavoysAT@aoldotcom> wrote:
> On 13 Sep 2009 10:37:19 -0400, Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
> > Ok, time for some philosophical tought.
> IMO it matters not a jot if we have free will or not. My stance is that we
> should act as if we do have free will. The other way of living is a good excuse
> for bad behaviour, again IMO.
Why would it be a good excuse? Regardless of whether you have free will or
not, you can still feel pain. If you make bad things, you are very probably
going to suffer some physical or mental pain as a consequence (eg. sent to
jail or whatever). It makes no sense to go to jail just because you think
you have no free will.
--
- Warp
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Mike Raiford wrote:
> The computer is running a series of instructions to give the appearance
> of running Excel.
Electricity is flowing through silicon to give the appearance of running a
series of instructions.
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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> I chose to reply to this post.
Maybe you didn't. Not at the most basic level. Maybe it was just a
consequence of physics, not a true choice.
> I think people sometimes confuse "deterministic" with "predictable".
I don't think so. The very definition of "deterministic" is predictability.
The very word itself is saying so. It's the opposite of "non-deterministic",
which is unpredictability.
A chain of events is deterministic if it happens in a certain way because
there's no other way it could have happened. If the exact same initial setup
can be replicated, then the chain of events will happen in the exact same
way again, completely predictably. That's the very definition of
deterministic.
> The
> weather is deterministic, and well-understood. And yet, after millennia
> of trying, nobody can predict the weather.
Just because something is extremely hard to predict doesn't mean it's
not deterministic and impossible to predict. It just means that we don't
have the computing power to predict it yet.
(But weather is probably affected also by quantum randomness, so in that
case it's really non-deterministic and impossible to predict with exact
accuracy. You can only make statistical approaches.)
Anyways, whether physical events are predictable or not, it doesn't
change the philosophical concept of "free choice" which I wrote about.
--
- Warp
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