Someone once said that locks are to protect us from honest people. i.e., if I knew that your front door was unlocked, and you weren’t home, and you had valuables, I might be tempted to ghost in and swipe 'em. The temptation has been too much for some people.
Agreement. I’d be uncomfortable if someone were to base legislation on their interpretation of theological free will.
But computers can labour for years over prime number calculations. I do not see time taken as a good measure of determinism.
I did mention time, so that’s my fault; I was actually talking about the absurd level of complication involved. All those neurons, all that messy and wasteful duplication, all that distraction… (Gee, I’m really hungry…) It’s one of the least efficient ways to make a decision ever devised.
(Committee meetings are second worst… But, in many ways, a human mind is “a committee,” as various parts of the mind all have their input into the process.)
(Gee, I’m really hungry…)
I just caught this from another thread. These two comments pretty much sum up this entire discussion:
The MWI is fully deterministic. This is fully and unambiguously “Newtonian” in the sense that every single grain of sand – in every world – is fully determined, including which percent of worlds have the grain of sand here instead of there.
The entire essence of the thing is that the complexity we see around us, including the apparent “randomness” of events at the quantum level, stems from hard, simple laws of physics that are never violated. Everything we experience is based on these laws of nature, which can apparently be expressed in an extremely short amount of space.
If you’re almost certain that the MWI is true, then you’re almost certain we live in a determined universe.
And based on what I’ve read from physicists, I agree. The MWI is probably right. Any concept that’s thrown in on top of the basic laws of physics can theoretically be derived from those initial laws. We essentially never have the computational power to do such a derivation, which means we must necessarily rely on higher-level rules to do the best we can, but any such higher-level explanation will by necessity be less accurate than one which can start from the actual simple rules of the universe.
I was clicking back through the thread, and I missed this one earlier.
Evolution can be extremely wasteful, of course, as any biologist like Dawkins will tell you. The path dependency of evolutionary change creates wasteful “mistakes” that even the worst engineer wouldn’t make. To assert that it’s not wasteful “on that level” is just an empty statement. It’s wasteful on whatever level that continues to work. Obviously the human mind has worked. Any waste that exists from the development of mammalian and primate mental processes is now baked in. Unlike an engineer, evolution can’t start again from scratch.
Er…not quite. Each individual world in the MWI might be deterministic, but the overall envelope of worlds isn’t. That’s why we have one world where Erwin’s cat dies, and another world where the cat lives. The overall model is not deterministic.
That’s the whole point of the MWI: it gets around the “collapse of the wave function” conundrum. The wave form never needs to collapse: worlds just split apart.
Which one? The one where the cat’s death was determined…or his life? The one where the Uranium atom was determined to split at this microsecond…or that microsecond?
Evolution is wasteful…but not to the degree of allowing humans to devote some huge proportion of our metabolism to support an organ that has no function. If our decisions are pre-determined, then our brain isn’t doing anything. Robotic or insectile tropisms would produce the same results, vastly more efficiently.
I have my own theory about this which is something between an Epiphenomenon and Will.
Let me take it step by step:
We got here by evolution- most able to compete in an environment survives better. Animals occurred when multi-cellular organisms staying largely static were out performed by mobile organisms. Plants have vestigial “senses”- tropisms for light, water etc.; these became rudimentary senses in lower animals and eventually senses in higher animals- first of all non-conscious like blindsight, pain, heat, or rudimentary proprioception.
So far, so non-contentious.
Now higher animals began to model the world- not verbally as we are able to do, but simply, and a rudimentary form of consciousness based on basic senses above came about where such multiple basic senses created an internal model of the world. It is obvious how this might improve performance- rather than risk your leg being bitten off, you can start to predict what might happen before a disastrous consequence- death before reproduction etc!
So higher animals start to have an internal representation of the world based by metaphor on very basic senses. Now add in a growing conceptual and figurative complexity whereby part of the brain can be used as a sandbox in a more active manner- a higher animal ‘thinks’ if I do this, that will happen, but if I do that…
We have a good enough method of predicting the future that improves fitness- of course it is selected for.
So we have awareness and the start of complex consciousness (and with it the Illusion of Free Will is beginning!!!) So complex consciousness operating as a sandbox becomes a parallel process feeding back hisitoric experience and learned behaviours to the other inputs to the system- sensation and internal emotional state.
Why is this not Free Will? Because the sandbox is not part of the causative chain that leads from neuron firing to behaviour, but a semi detached process.
Now comes the clever bit:
Thought experiment:If instead of such a sandbox, a percipient animal had access to an encyclopaedia of all likely animal behaviours in a given environment (not perfect but good enough as above) and rather than using a sandbox, it merely consulted the animalopaedia (yellow striped insect may sting, yellow striped animal may eat you.) that would also be evolutionarily useful. Now in this case, what would we say was the cause of avoiding the tiger? Neurons firing certainly, but is the encyclopaedia a cause, or merely a factual input that feeds-back and changes the cause by the use of information. Consulting the encyclopaedia is a parallel process feeding back historic experience and learned behaviours to the other inputs to the system- sensation and internal emotional state. Is the encyclopaedia (an object) a cause or merely an effect of information in the environment. If we are not willing to say that a book can be responsible in this case, surely its analogue- the sandbox- is also outwith the chain of causation and responsibility. It is parallel to the chain of cause, but effective in altering external behaviour without being a prime cause.
So the sandbox is not quite an epiphenomenon (an experience with no effect on the world- which is difficult to see being produced by evolution if the lack of effect gave no survival advantage) and a case of a mental object causing atoms to swerve (Free Will which is so contrary to everything we know about the natural world.)
From where I sit I think I have the best of both worlds- an evolutionary defensible argument for the production of human consciousness, whilst not subverting the apparent laws of nature as we understand them by claiming some supernatural influence on the universe.
Pjen: I followed that with some difficulty – I really am in deeper waters than I’m rated for – and definitely admired it. (Well, okay, except for your last sentence, with which I very strongly disagree. I hold to a volitional model that partakes of no “supernatural influence” of any sort. At least, this time, you didn’t exactly say that I do, although the implication is there.)
I just can’t agree. Why would evolution produce the ability to model the world and conduct “what if” exercises in the sandbox – “What if I punch my boss in the nose, the way the s.o.b. deserves? Oh, that’s right, I get fired and lose my house” – without the attendant ability to make decisions on the basis of those thought-experiments?
If the decisions are “hard wired” and deterministic – what is the point of the cost-benefit analysis? Nature would know ahead of time. It would be much more efficient to build in instinctive behaviors to cover such instances.
And…indeed…evolution has done exactly that! We humans have instincts that cause us very great reluctance to punch our bosses in the nose. We have bunches of “social instincts” that offer us guidance.
Yet we also have the ability to override them, and to choose to punch the basta’d anyway. We have built in incentives and inhibitors and the like – but, eventually, it does come down to a choice, which we make, in part, based on the modeling you describe.
You see my viewpoint as supernatural, and I can’t think of any way to persuade you otherwise. At very least, I beg of you to see that I do not believe my viewpoint is supernatural. I fear we are at an impasse. (This happens often in the best debates.)
Wrong. Completely and totally wrong.
This is such a fundamentally ignorant mistake, I would be stone shocked by it if this were any other thread.
No.
It would be absurdly easy for a programmer to create a fully determined computer program simulating evolutionary processes, where the agents that survive do so because they have more processing power, and work more efficiently, than their competitors. Even in a determined system, the agents inside the system don’t have perfect knowledge of what’s been determined. Even in a determined system, agents need their artificial neurons to fire in order for them to compute complex problems like finding large primes or estimating the probability that there’s a lion hiding in that tall grass. Even in a determined system, programs need more than one nanosecond to reach the end of their computation when their given tasks are computationally expensive.
Using a pseudorandom number generator with identical seed, an evolution-simulation program will have the same outcome every time. That’s what “determinism” is all about. Everything that happens could be predicted from knowing its initial state (this is to say theoretically predicted, from the perspective of someone outside the system). Based on the original program, the outcome is destined before I hit “enter” to run it even for the first time.
But my real-world computer needs a bigger brain to run the thing more quickly. That’s fully in keeping with determinism. And similarly, the agents inside the determined world simply don’t have access to all relevant information they would like to survive in their hostile environment. Their fate is sealed. Their fate happens to be that bigger brains solve puzzles within the world more quickly and survive. The ones that live will be those who have more power under the hood, which will enable them to compute processes inside the world better than their competitors. Bigger brains will be destined to keep the agents alive to reproduce.
Does this sound familiar?
If you want to know what other people mean when they use the word “determinism”, then you’re going to have to start asking those people. It’s clearly not sufficient for you to look up the word in a book and try to decipher the meaning on your own, because you’re on a fundamentally wrong path.
You were bitching, justifiably, when other people were trying to tell you what “free will” meant. They don’t get to define the term for you. Similarly, you don’t get to tell everyone else that in a deterministic world, there would be no need for big brains, because that reveals that you haven’t got the slightest clue what determinism actually is or what it entails. You have done literally no programming whatsoever of any agent-based decision-making in deterministic models. You have no knowledge of programmable learning within a determined system. You have no awareness of Bayesian probability and inference at all. (No crystal ball. All this is perfectly clear from your posts.)
You don’t get to tell the rest of us the implications of determinism. Because you don’t know what it is.
If I had to guess from your bewildering statements in previous posts, I’d say you’re hung up on “predictability” – mistaking predictability within the system from theoretical predictability outside the system. This is how you somehow came to the absolutely absurd belief that the MWI was not deterministic, when in fact the entire purpose of the MWI is that it’s the simplest idea that returns to the fully deterministic (“Newtonian”) conception of the universe. Again, in any other thread, it would shock me to the point of disbelief that someone who claims to be certain about its validity doesn’t actually know the driving force that underlies it. That the MWI is deterministic is the whole reason that the idea exists. (The last link there is the kid-friendly intro version.)
Step One for you right now is to remedy this problem. You need to start asking questions about determinism rather than making silly statements about it.
No no no no no.
There is literally no such thing as a deterministic system where agents inside the system can make such perfect predictions.
It’s an inherent impossibility. Their thought processes are part of the system. Their minds are part of the system. In order to make such perfect predictions about the system as a whole, their minds (which are inside the system) would have to encompass the entire system. Their minds would have to be as big as, or bigger than, the universe that contains their mind. Just impossible. The only way to make agents inside the system smarter, for them to make better choices, is for them to have bigger brains (more processing power) and better algorithms for coming to conclusions with incomplete information.
This becomes immediately obvious the very first time when anyone tries to create algorithmic agents who learn and try to make good “decisions” inside the little world that’s created for them.
Agreed. I think as I have stated above the problem is one of confusing Ethics with Ontology.
Ontologically I can see no reason to deviate from the monist project of modern science which does not admit any non describable, non investigatable proposal into what we call knowledge. The only things that exist are those that we can define and measure. Other concepts may exist but these are ciphers, models “AS IFs”, metaphors which are part of the human experience of being a brain and body in a social environment. These non-material objects exist only in human consciousness and not in the natural world. They occur because they are our only way of understanding the world- not because they are a causative part of the world. Ethics is one of these concepts! As is causation!
I see our behaviour as caused by our brain and body with its personal history of interaction with the environment including other sentient beings. I see our view of the world being a product of this situation, but not a causative factor. Our concepts are available to us in the same way that our senses are (both are inputs to our decision making processes, yet we do not blame our sensory perceptions for our behaviour- we say that our internal processing of that information (mechanistically) is the decider (not chooser!). In the same way, internal models of the external world are not causes of behaviour, but inputs. Our personhood is our experience of having this modelling system and consciousness has been created by evolutionary processes because it is part of nature available for evolution to utilise, but organised in such a manner as to be currently beyond our modelling ability. It maybe that the concept is too reflexive for our ability to make models.
btw did you see my note about San Diego- live in Scotland now but am ex-IB, Mar Vista and SDSU!
Well, okay, whatever. Nice knowing you. Have a lovely existence.
Do some reading, if you want to learn. Otherwise, enjoy proclaiming edicts from your thundering crag of omniscience.
Pity, as I thought, for a moment, you might actually have had something to offer this discussion.
Oops, no, I missed it! NIFTY! I’m from SDSU. (Mathematics.)
Is there surfing in Scotland? 
very good but rare surfing in Scotland!
I was Physics major, Maths minor 1972 when it was going from SDSC to SDSU. There is some surfing but most head south to Cornwall in England. I am too infirm to even go in the water now, but my two sons have surfing lessons when we are in IB.
This from the person who stopped reading after two paragraphs.
Hypocrisy, thy name is Trinopus.
For the record, I cited five different sources that support what I said. This last is particularly unambiguous and presented in pleasing graph format, though it lacks the historical background that some of the others provide. This really isn’t a hard issue for anyone who is willing to read other people’s posts before dismissing what they have to say.
Thankfully, this thread won’t go anywhere. If the day comes when Trinopus is emotionally prepared to read an entire post, instead of stopping after two paragraphs in order to lecture others that they should read more, I imagine the majority of the links will still be functional regardless of any dust that accumulates in the interim.
In my view (for what it is worth) the MWI is both deterministic and Libertrarian depending on your viewpoint. Externally it is as deterministic as a bagatelle which it resembles. Internally it is Libertarian as it creates the impression from the user’s point of view of Libertarian choice.
Think of it this way- as a ball falls in a bagatelle- from the outside all goals are possible and each one is determined absolutely by its history, but riding on top of a ball it seems that each collapse is a choice leading to a specific destination.
Like much in philosophy one must be sure of what the words mean and how those words are used.
I have no problem with its dualistic appearance depending on ones viewpoint.
You’re absolutely right that language is important, and that’s why we need to be up front about this and stop equivocations before they’re given a chance to muddle meaning. And this is an equivocation.
This is yet another reason why computer metaphors are so commonly used. The precision necessary to get a computer to do we want it to do is exactly the same sort of clarity that we need for discussions of this sort. And if you’ve ever programmed Bayesian learning into a deterministic system, the distinction is crystal clear. You can’t possibly even conceive of writing the program unless you fully and totally understand the distinction. An agent with incomplete knowledge embedded within a deterministic system is not “free” in any sense, unless you are deliberately choosing your definitions so that “Ignorance is freedom”. I would recommend against that particular formulation.
It’s important to keep in mind when speaking of the MWI that all branches sort of already exist. All the “stuff” in the universe exists from the beginning, and no new stuff is made. So it’s not exactly that a new world comes into existence when the divergence happens. As an analogy: both branches (kind of) exist from the beginning, and the divergence is only the two parting ways – which they were destined to do from the beginning. This section of a video from Sean Carroll illustrates this point.
One of the agents in Carroll’s example goes left, and the other agent goes right. Both agents exist from the beginning, sort of riding parallel with each other until the junction, but neither agent knowing which one they are. So one agent will go left, but doesn’t know it yet. One agent will go right, and doesn’t know it yet. But they’re destined to do this. It looks random but it’s not. One agent is always the one that goes left, and the other is always the one that goes right, and that random-looking quantum event is actually part of the determined nature of their system.
To prioritize this “random” experience of the agent is to elevate the agent’s ignorance into some new perverse definition of freedom.
Their ignorance might feel divinely liberating them. But the feeling is bollocks. One goes left and one goes right. It’s determined. An agent is ignorant, and so from their perspective “anything might happen”. But that’s not true randomness, it’s merely their own blindness to their situation. It seems to them like a series of “random” events, but the “randomness” is merely a function of the limited perspective of a limited agent. The subjective experience of randomness is based only in ignorance and in the limited perspective. The ignorance does not define the system, nor does it introduce any real notion of freedom.
(And just to be absolutely clear about the previous posts I wrote, I’ll repeat Trinopus’s actual sentences: “Each individual world in the MWI might be deterministic, but the overall envelope of worlds isn’t. That’s why we have one world where Erwin’s cat dies, and another world where the cat lives. The overall model is not deterministic.” This is absolutely and totally wrong, as I said, and it’s the reverse of what you’re trying to argue here. The overall model is deterministic. The only possible way to introduce any non-determinism – which I must emphasize again is an unacceptable equivocation – is to look at the individual agents inside individual worlds and elevate their destined ignorance, as if that destined ignorance is something special.)
First I would say that a debating technique without abuse is normally well appreciated.
Secondly I would say that your sentence:
“To prioritize this “random” experience of the agent is to elevate the agent’s ignorance into some new perverse definition of freedom.”
shows why, depending on perspective, the MWI gives succour to both determinists and libertarians. Elevating the experience of apparent choice is exactly what libertarianism is IMHO.
I agree. Psychologically, non-determinists might be succored by their ignorance.
It’s psychologically easy, even natural, to believe that our ignorance represents some kind of freedom. This is the source of gambling problems, where people with no concept of expected value think they’re “due” for a big score. Ignorance of probability gives them the genuine feeling of hope that the odds are now in their favor.
This is delusion. That’s not how casino games work (at least, not the modern versions of these games). And bringing an ontological notion of “freedom” into an MWI universe is the same kind of mistake.
People will find comfort wherever they want to find it. But the MWI is a precisely defined deterministic system. It was created by a determinist relying on unambiguous mathematical expression. There is no room for incoherent undefined nonsense. Everything within the system is inevitable, and just as inevitable is that any agents inside the system must remain ignorant of the whole since their brains are smaller than the whole. In this sense, the only difference between this quantum determinism and the previous one-world determinism is the relative size of our ignorance. In an MWI world, we might be emotionally humbled by how many other “worlds” are out there that we will never perceive. But even if there were one world, I would personally remain humbled by how very little I am destined to know. These are emotional responses only, and don’t tell us anything about the actual nature of the universe.
Whether we live in an MWI universe is a Great Debate sort of question. But the definition of it is a factual question, and it has an unambiguous factual answer. It’s their business where they find their succor, but they don’t get to equivocate on what the idea is and how it works.
I agree entirely.
But I don’t personally consider the unambiguous correction of an egregious factual mistake to be abuse.
More generally: I give an enormous amount of thought to the rhetorical style of my posts. This is the third draft of this post, but I’m not just writing this for you. If there are any others still reading this thread, I want those others to know, without any doubt whatever, what the determinism of this particular quantum interpretation entails. This is an abstruse topic, and if by chance some other people are still reading, they need to know that the definition is settled and that the previous reference to it as non-deterministic as a whole is a huge error.
There were no insults. I didn’t call the poster stupid. I called it an ignorant mistake, and it is. But ignorance can be fixed. All it would take is a little reading.