I have no problem with scientists believing in the supernatural or being theists. A scientist that believes in the supernatural just needs to make sure he is not mixing them. That he is not letting supernatural explanations seep into his scientifical thought (where they have no power) and not expect science to explain the supernatural (where it has no power). Some people might call that compartmentalization and say like it is a bad word but I just find it good practice.
I am starting to see how you could believe in all sentient beings having a supernatural ability to be spontaneous and still not accept that there is another superior supernatural being (god) who “rules” over the rest. Fair call if that is what you are conveying.
So yes, there is a way to be an atheist and believe in a strong supernatural Free Will. To those who fall in that group, I apologize for calling Bull on them.
Well, I think that you are making the more extraordinary claim and thus have the responsibility of showing that a mechanical system when you increase its mechanical complexity becomes moral, i.e. develops an independence from its mechanisms.
Ball B is not responsible for ball A pushing it towards ball C. We agree on that. I believe that, no matter how many balls you add to this ricochet, no ball is ever responsible for the movement of any other ball. Only the shooter has any responsibility. That groups of these balls form recognizable systems we call “persons” and interact with other similar groups in ways that are not self-evident to someone who cannot see the individual balls, doesn’t make these groups spontaneous. They are still balls bouncing around the way balls do.
Take a cellular automata for illustration (let me know if I need to hunt for a link for you in case you are not familiar with those).
My first exposure to this idea was a computer program called Life*. Wikipedia attributes the original “game” to John Conway and gives an animation of a nice example.
[sub]*I had so much fun with it on my Atari 400.[/sub]
I asked you to cite some examples though. I suspect that you are misinterpreting what sort of free will they are talking about.
But even if you weren’t, your complaint is still irrational. Atheism is the lack of belief in GOD, not the lack of belief in things outside either what we know about the natural world, or outside the natural world itself. Many Taoists and Buddhists, for instance, are atheists, as are a lot of New Agey folks, but that doesn’t preclude them believing in all sorts of supernatural woo. And there is nothing hypocritical about it.
My point has always been that the problems of restraint are not particular to chemistry. Talking about no restraint, when the “restraint” is the particulars of the will itself, is itself incoherent period: it doesn’t matter what metaphysic you’re dealing with.
I don’t see why that would confuse you. A god could create a being that works in some way, and that way is via natural laws. All beings with wills have to makes choices in SOME way, some way that has a coherent causal logic. Otherwise there could be no responsibility. It makes no difference whether this way is natural or supernatural.
The unspoken implication you still have here is that somehow leaving natural laws solves the problem of them influencing and determining choices. But in my experience, retreating to the supernatural because it supposedly allows things the natural world does not is everywhere and always just a retreat into obscurity and avoidance. I’ll address your direct argument on this point next.
I can’t imagine why. I would say that this is about my least controversial claim. When we use higher-level terms like “eye” or “book” we are describing a general sort of thing, not a complete and exact description of the item. If we run our calculations based on one of these concepts, we will be using idealized approximations of the objects in the world, and our results will only be approximate. Our results will have errors. In order to get an exact result, we must start with an exact statement of the initial condition; a description of the state of the universe in the finest detail. To properly carry out the calculations, we must make the fine details (the atoms or the sub-atomic particles) the focus of our calculations. At this level, there is nothing about the atoms to distinguish them as being part of one entity or another. All atoms follow the same set of rules, and to generate the correct answer we must apply the same set of rules to all atoms equally.
The length or complexity of the calculations have nothing to do with it. To find the true answers to questions about higher-level concepts we must shift our focus and base our calculations on the finest level of detail available. Only then can we interpret the results and find our answer.
Deterministic calculations reveal to us everything that happened at the lowest level of the universe. From this we can observe different scales, and see the exact progression of what happened at whatever level of detail we choose. But even in the most basic formulations, causal questions require two types of information: causal sufficiency and causal necessity. Determinism only provides an answer to the former, and saying this in no way “weakens” determinism. I know of no reason for assuming that sufficiency is the only answer to causal questions, unless you can provide a good justification for doing so.
Hold on, do you see where I keep having a problem? You keep talking about this distinction between a being with and without Free Will… and I don’t have ANY idea what you think that means. How am I supposed to follow an argument when this supposedly key distinction doesn’t seem to have any operant definition that fits its context? I know you THINK you are telling me, later in this paragraph, what the distinction is, but I’m not sure you really are…
Ok, so here’s the problem. You’ve tried to pull a lot of the details we had in the mechanical case OUT of the way of the choicemaking in the hopes that its character/history won’t determine the choice, but you haven’t explained what replaces it: what is it exactly that functionally makes the choice between A and B? WHY is A picked and not B??? As far as I can tell, virtually any answer AT ALL to this question turns out to be just a more elaborate or more obscure variation of all the things you tried to remove from the mechanical example.
This tilting the table thing is colorful, but it doesn’t address the problem: how and by what is it decided to tilt the table a certain amount and not another different amount? No matter how you conceptualize the way the choice is made or executed, you still have to deal with that basic element.
This is simply false. First of all, unless you can better define free will, I don’t think you can conclude ANYTHING about the implications of it being there or not.
But second of all, there is nothing particularly black box about values, experiences, and so forth. We do, in fact, have these things regardless of the debate about free will. The best way I can argue this to you is to say that it doesn’t matter if we have free will or not (though that would imply that I knew what it was and the implications of that): we do have values, judgements of evil, and so forth, and thus we do have all sorts of various needs for punishment.
Whether or not its predetermined does not itself rule out it also being something consistent with certain very real moral values. This was JThunder’s mistake.
Uh, it is in the case of talking about purpose. The very usage of the term IMPLIES that there is someONE who is purposing: “purpose” is a verb disguised as a noun.
No. Not at all. How can I have agreed to it when I don’t think “Free Will” has any coherent meaning? How can I perceive something when I don’t know what it is I’m supposedly perceiving?
What we’ve said is that free will, no caps, exists and is experienced. I experience making choices, and they are MY choices: they are chosen based on the actions of something I identify as ME. That, however, is not in any way inconsistent with the idea that I am completely and ultimately determined by my pre-existing nature. What is “ME” can be 100% responsible for its choices, AND if someone designed me a certain way, they are also 100% responsible. Frankenstein’s monster was made by Frankenstein. The evil it did was it’s own chosen evil, with an experience of being the sort of being who would do such things, and by stopping it, one can stop the evil. But the Dr. is also completely responsible for making it that way. Two identities in a causal chain, one creating another that can act independently, but not without cause or a history behind its nature.
Again, what I “feel” is that I make choices. That experience doesn’t require any of the goobledygook of Free Will to avoid being illusion. If anything, the only candidate for illusion is the perception of self, which in much research seems to actually post-date the choicemaking.
The problem is that you see it as an either or when in fact it can be both. You ARE some certain collection of bouncing balls. It isn’t the “bouncing balls” making the decision, it IS you: you are a higher level view of the bouncing balls.
I understand that, but I want to highlight something about science that is often overlooked in the face of the all important demand for a falsifiable hypothesis. Science also tends to focus inquiry directly on having to solve and answer a particular problem in a direct way, and this sort of discipline is often lost once we leave that realm.
Well, then let me stop you right there. I didn’t ask or even challenge you as to provide some testable or even speculative description of how the supernatural plays a role in the natural world. As far as I am concerned, we could simply forget the natural world entirely and deal purely in the supernatural. I am asserting that the failure of “Free Will” to make sense is universal: it doesn’t matter how you play it, the inconsistency of the claimed component concepts is fatal to the idea.
Not explaining how the soul chooses A over B, given a choice, simply dodges the whole thrust of my question and the whole point of my objection to the idea that “Free Will” is some important informative concept that can only be fully understood or explained with -insert metaphysic here-. Whether it’s a soul or neurons, something has to make the difference between a choice of A and a choice of B, and whatever that something is, by its very existence, collapses the idea of Free Will. Worse, we cannot do away with the need for that something, because without it, we then lose the key element of being able to trace back the responsibility for a choice to a particular person/soul/thing/whatever.
Since you spent so much time on it, and I appreciate that, I’ll address what you subsequently say, but please don’t forget the above points, which are really the key to my criticism. I have to admit that I don’t understand the chess analogy at all: not in translating it to the natural world, and not even on its own terms.
The question is: what are the alternatives, even in some supernatural interaction of things? What is the alternative to pre-determined laws. Undetermined events with no causes? That may get you the “free” part (and frankly, we don’t need to leave the natural world to get it: QM provides all sorts of fun things in that sense), but in doing so you lose the will part.
Okay. But how does that solve the problem of SOMETHING particular and distinguishing of a PARTICULAR will having to determine the choice?
This is a pretty grand scheme, and I can certainly appreciate and conceptualize something of what you mean by it. It even sort of makes the chess description make sense. The problem, as I see it, however, is that none of it has attempted to crack the black box of what does the actual choosing and how. Even if there is the elaborate process based on these choices to create the entire natural world around them, you still haven’t addressed at all why one being prefers one choice and another prefers another and why way back when this was all being hashed out.
It also doesn’t seem very plausible if we assume that there are important non-competitive metaphysical choices like salvation. How or why would omniscient person NOT choose, say, salvation over damnation? How could we possibly explain how or why anyone would pick that unless they had, well, some determining factor that made them choose it?
As I said, you can feel free to describe any sort of grand metaphysic you want: I’m not going to be picky about demanding you stick to natural law. But I do demand that there be a logical explanation of “choosing” that somehow demonstrates how there is such a thing as “Free Will” and that this makes some intelligible difference to that process. I do not feel you have done so, nor even really tried to do so, though I appreciate all the effort to expand and be clear about metaphysical elements.
Dr. Love, “[d]eterminism “works” only on the smallest pieces of the universe” finds no traction with me because it is poorly defined, it seems arbitrarily limiting. If you care to provide a clearer definition of where determinism stops working (and what is meant by “working”) we might make some progress toward each other’s point.
I think you may be straying from determined into determinable. Determinists generally do not claim that the universe is determinable, only that it is determined. Let’s try it this way:
(1) The universe is causally closed. That is, everything that happens in the universe is determined by the prior state of the universe and nothing else. Since you are a physicalist, I’m sure you will find this palatable.
(2) All events are at the end of a chain of causality. Hopefully this is part of your compatibilist view of determinism.
(3) Together, (1) and (2) gives us the conclusion that no chain starts within the universe.
Of course, (3) leads to other hard questions of where the chains do start. Can we at least agree that they cannot start within a subset of the universe such as ourselves, our bodies, our minds and such?
If I read this out of context I would swear you were making my argument for me. I like that you introduced focus though. If we shift our focus away from the small place (where we agree determinism rules) to the big picture, we do see things differently. But our not focusing on the small parts doesn’t mean they aren’t still there within every part of the larger picture.
If you’re claiming that the prior state of the universe is not sufficient determination for a given action then you need to fill in the missing piece for me. Your doing so while retaining the physicalist title would go a long way toward bringing me in.
I mean that, in order for the future to be determined, the current state must be defined in the most precise possible way. Higher-level concepts are not defined precisely enough to be of use in determining later states of the universe. If you are talking about higher-level objects, you will have to qualify your statements about them with probabilities. This does not mean that the universe is no longer deterministic on a fundamental level. It is caused by the lack of the sort of exact information that there is on the lowest level. To take an obvious example, the statement “a boy throws a ball” is far too vague to determine later states of the system, even if the system is causally closed. Statements about higher-level objects must be translated into statements about the basic parts of the universe.
I’m not sure I follow the determined-determinable distinction. If what you mean is that the universe is not practically determinable, that, as beings inside the universe, it is impossible for us to access enough computing power to determine the next state of the universe, then I’m ok with that. If you mean that it is not determinable in principle, that there is no mechanism, regardless of computing power or any other variable, can derive the next state from the previous one, then this seems both obviously false (the universe performed the calculation successfully), and a contradiction of the statement of determinism (that all we need to get to the next state is information on the previous one).
I don’t think I have any objections to your definition. I would point out that the chains of causality are chains of causal sufficiency. These, by themselves, cannot answer every causal question that there is. I’ll give an example shortly.
Yes, I believe we can agree to that. Tell me if this statement accurately reflects what you’re saying:
After the initial state of the universe, there can be no events or causal chains that do not have a sufficient cause/condition in a previous state of the universe.
They do not go away, but when we shift our focus to different levels, the kind of answer to questions we ask must also change if it is to be meaningful. If we ask about a dog, discussing atoms that make no reference to the dog or any of its surroundings does not provide a meaningful answer.
Let me try an example. You mentioned Conway’s Game of Life above. Would you agree that the Game of Life represents a deterministic system? For those who are not familiar, the game has a single rule that uses the current state of the game to derive the next state of the game, and does so without any reference to chance, and without needing any information other than what is on the board. Suppose you are shown a board with a single 2x2 square on it, like this:
x x
x x
You can now tell me everything about the future of this game. But what if I ask you about the past? Perhaps the previous state was identical to the current state. Perhaps it was one of these:
x x
xx xx
Or any of the other infinite amount of possibilities (try putting a single “on” square out in the middle of nowhere).
Would you agree that this is an example of causal information that determinism is not able to give us? If so, then the fact of determinism, even when accompanied by a perfect understanding of natural law and a complete description of a state of the universe, is not enough to tell us everything about the universe.
I should point out that, due to the New Year celebration, I may not be able to post again tonight. I’ll try to check back tomorrow if I don’t get the chance tonight.
The universe is not even theoretically determinable.
At that most basic level are statistical likelihoods and random fluctuations. If you are talking about those most basic objects, you will have to qualify your statements about them with probabilities. A particle (or string … whatever) foomphs into existence and out. There another one. Oops hit something. The exact starting state is theoretically unknowable and given that we are dealing with the ultimatel massively nonlinear (read “chaotic”) system, huge differences in later states can result from infintessimal differences of conditions at an earlier state.
Which of course fails to inform as to the question of whether or not it is determined inso far as every future state is determined by the conditions of previous states including those random factors.
Which fails to inform much about the presence of free will and morality at the level of individual sentient selfs, for Dr. Love nails it
And by the way, why assume that “the chain” started anywhere or anytime?
Yes. This is what I mean by determinable. You use determinability in your arguments:
"I mean that, in order for the future to be determined, the current state must be defined in the most precise possible way. Higher-level concepts are not defined precisely enough to be of use in determining later states of the universe."The current state need not be defined in the most precise way. It is what it is. We don’t determine later states, the state of the universe (including all the atoms in our brains) determines later states.
"To take an obvious example, the statement “a boy throws a ball” is far too vague to determine later states of the system, even if the system is causally closed."The vagueness of our cognitive representation of the universe is irrelevant. The universe determines the later states - not us.
"Statements about higher-level objects must be translated into statements about the basic parts of the universe."Why?
Yes, assuming that “cause” is used here as in “the kick caused the stone to move.” I stumbled on that one earlier.
Discussing those atoms at the “dog” level doesn’t allow the dog to escape being matter. Discussing our actions at the “will” level doesn’t allow the will to escape being determined either.
Correct. Even impossibly perfect understanding of the universe does not always let us traverse the chains backwards. So what? That’s completely irrelevant to the universe moving forward on its own. Human beings are neither the soul nor the raison d’être of the universe.
To me, the interesting thing about the Game of Life is the concept of emergence. The individual cells abide by only four simple, well-defined rules. Their programming knows nothing about “cannons”, “gliders”, movement or growth. But we see those things. They are emergent properties. Knowing only the emergent properties would give us misleading mystical reasons for their existence. We might even assign purpose to the emergent properties but there is no corresponding purpose programed into the cells. Do you believe that our thoughts, minds, consciousness, our sense of self are anything other than emergent properties of the chemical actions in our brain? What we experience as thought may be no more than the hum of the machine as it does the actual work.
[Sub]Happy New Year, Doc. I hope you too had a merry celebration. Forgive me if any of the above seems muddled by hangover.[/Sub]
I’m not going to attempt to speak for DSeid but I was thinking along the same lines, analogy-wise. One can state — accurately, and in accordance with what our science tells us and zillions of empirical experiments corroborate — that what we observe as “dog”, which appears to us as a solid, animated living object, furry on the outside, etc etc, is actually atoms interacting with other atoms, exerting various forces on each other… if you zoomed in yet closer, “atoms” would be understood as interactions of charges and probabilities, etc etc… the latter, reductionistic micro understandings would seem to “dissolve” the macro understandings, uncovering our understanding of “dog” as an illusion, there is no “dog” here because a closer examination reveals that “dog” is just a behavior of some atoms.
Problem is, you’re really going to have your hands full explaining “roll over” and “fetch” behaviors if you’re required to only speak of what the atoms comprising the “dog” are doing.
The true illusion here is not that there is a “dog” — there really is a dog! — but rather that the reductionistic picture in some way invalidates the legitimacy of the holistic one.
One valid way of understanding a phenomenon does not necessarily invalidate another even if it would appear that it does do so.
We know from prediction (the art of looking at variables describing the status quo and extrapolating from that to what will be, based on causal determinism) and from kitchen recipes (intentionally bringing about an end result by setting up the values of ingredients and proportions and exposing them to stimuli such as temperature for a specified duration in order to utilize causal determinism to generate a predicted, and eminently repeatable, result) that causal determinism is a valid way of understanding the world.
It would appear at first glance that in order for things to be determined by the vectors of prior states (location, momentum, energy levels, etc), there can be no room for free will as an explanation for behavior.
I’d suggest you rethink that. Even the dyxlexic agnostic is forced to acknowledge that there really is a dog.
What is telling them that? Their brains. AFAIK, no determinists deny the utility of discussing a collection of atoms at the “dog” level. Most don’t see the need to imbue the collection with unnecessary inventions like qualia. Which came first: the “dog” collection of atoms or the label that our brains have assigned it? And so it is with free will.
Apos, Let me put on hold our running exchange since we are still stuck in not having a common definition of Free Will to understand each other. Let’s tackle that first.
free will (no caps) I believe we agree on. We make choices which can rate as moral or inmoral and that justifies our judgement of them and our desire to punish or reward them. So far, so good. This is all as it happens in our brains/minds.
As for Free Will (with caps), although I have floated the idea before, it has always come surrounded by clutter so I understand if it has gone amiss.
Free Will is the ability to make a choice based on the consequences of that choice.
Is that something we can agree on?. I am having a rough time fighting the temptation to add more to it saying what it is not but I understand those don’t really hit it with you. I always had a hard time myself with Invertabrates. You can’t define something by what it isn’t or doesn’t have.
I believe that Free Will as thus defined is not possible in a deterministic or chaotic universe. Free Will is a matter of purpose and I believe there is no room in nature for purpose, only consequences.
As has been said, all chains of causation inevitably go back to the origin of the Universe. This leaves us with a single causation event and everything we observe is a consequence of that event.
I believe our Souls (a word I use hesitantly, for lack of a better word and in the hopes that you don’t link it with the classical christian cliches that normally surround it) being eternal have all agreed to this universe in full knowledge of the consequences of the choices they have made. Before (a term we are forced to by our human perception of time) the universe was created we made every choice we had to make and this universe was created to fulfill all of our choices.
And making all souls fully conscious of the outcome of their choices and co-creators of the universe helps to give some perspective with the problem of evil and suffering. Innocent victims (even a baby killed in utero by a bomb blast) agreed to this universe with the same freedom and knowledge that a centenary Dalai Lama. Good or evil (by our human standards), we all live the outcome of our choices. Human suffering becomes tolerable (even if not to our mortal perception). Circumstances of life stop excusing or diminishing goodness or evil. Good or evil become potent absolute choices made in full knowledge of their consequences.
Wait, how is that not just the “free will” we discussed before? Considering the consequences of a choice is not a particularly special or mysterious quality, and it certainly doesn’t fit the bill as whatever this thing is that ya’ll are claiming is incompatible with determinism, or somehow makes us free from our own natures. Where’s the beef?
Why not? Considering consequences is a perfectly intelligible action that can be undertaken. Purpose is something that beings have for things that they choose to do or make. What exactly is the deal here?
Maybe, maybe not. There are all sorts of different things that could be other than pure billiard ball determinism: all sorts of randomness could be involved, QM effects, and so forth.
Ok, like I said, however you want to conceptualize it. But you don’t get to just slip in “making choices” in nonchalantly in the back door when that is EXACTLY THE VERY THING I am demanding you explain, even if only in speculative theory. WHY does person X choose this and person Y choose that? How does this mysterious quality known as “Free Will” make a difference in the choosing process to transform the “free will” choicemaking we all agree upon into something else: something that somehow frees one from their own nature, from their own will? And what sense does that even make?
Ok. While I find that scenario interesting though completely implausible, that’s not really what’s at issue here at all. What’s at issue is that you still haven’t explained anything at all about the actual process of making choices, which is what I’ve been asking about over and over. What is this special “Free Will” element you claim is distinctive about us people that is somehow so fundamentally different from other things making choices in the “free will” sense?
Why would anyone choose to be a murderer and another a nun in this elaborate scenario of yours? Why? That makes no sense… unless. Unless there is some reason why these people are different to begin with, even in this magical soul world you are talking about. In other words, that there is some nature to them, some causal explanation… and now we’re back where we started.
What is different between free will and Free Will is that free will is simply an epiphenomenon of physics. Our mind-machines might have all the jolly good time they want debating the virtues of free will but it is just a by-product of electron jumps. There is no real choice there, just a billiards shot (with or without added randomness, as needed).
How does Free Will work? What’s the mechanism? I don’t know. Maybe there are constraints to Free Will. Maybe we can choose between vanilla or chocolate but there is no strawberry. Are they also machines following a different nature? Makes no difference to us, as we would have no way of knowing.
Why would they choose different things?. Imagine being a cell of the Life cellular automata. You can choose your initial state, knowing everybody else’s choice and know how many iterations it would run. You make your decision based on what is your desired final state. If you know what your desired final state is, then different people in different places would need different initial states even to reach the same final state. (yes, I know I am not addressing WHY they would want a particular final state, just why different initial states are explicable)
All I know is that IF there is going to be some sort of Free Will (please remember I am not necessarily for it), it cannot be something explained by nature and must be supernatural (to us, it might still be, as you said, just a different nature). And that free will (no caps) is not Free and is not Will.
btw, if you read my post in the “Why does God allow…” thread (#48) you might gather that I am almost circular in my reasoning about life choices (a bit of a must for the eternal).
What I mean to say is, if that statement is the only information given to the determining system, whether it’s the universe, some guy with a pencil and paper, or Conway’s Game of Life, the system will not be able to function deterministically, due to the inexactness of the statement.
Because the focus of the determining system must be on the smallest units of the physics.
This is important because, in addition to determining everything physical, most people seem to assume that determinism also determines everything causal. The fact that we cannot move backwards disproves the latter hypothesis. This fact is important in the sort of compatabilism that I would argue for. But this compatabilism needs at least one other principle that we don’t seem to have agreed on yet.
We seem to be getting stuck somewhere in here, but I’m not exactly sure where. I’d like to break apart the second paragraph quoted above, to see if I can pinpoint where we disagree:
To me, the interesting thing about the Game of Life is the concept of emergence. The individual cells abide by only four simple, well-defined rules. Their programming knows nothing about “cannons”, “gliders”, movement or growth. But we see those things. They are emergent properties.
I could have written this myself. Do you mean to imply by the phrase “emergent properties” that gliders and other things are “less real” than the individual cells? Is it incorrect to discuss the movement or growth of these objects?
Knowing only the emergent properties would give us misleading mystical reasons for their existence.
If you mean that we might make incorrect statements like “the universe was created to achieve the goal of creating gliders,” then I am in full agreement. If you mean something else, then please elaborate.
We might even assign purpose to the emergent properties but there is no corresponding purpose programmed into the cells.
I fully agree that there is no purpose programmed into the cells. I am not convinced that assignments of purpose to emergent properties (to use your term) must necessarily be wrong; but I don’t believe that we can effectively argue this point until we have agreed about the nature of emergent objects.
Do you believe that our thoughts, minds, consciousness, our sense of self are anything other than emergent properties of the chemical actions in our brain?
I would say no; but this answer hinges on how we think of emergent properties.
What we experience as thought may be no more than the hum of the machine as it does the actual work.
It would be arrogant of me to discount that possibility, but I think there is more to it, as a result of being an emergent property. Again, I don’t think we can have any fruitful discussion on this unless we agree on what is meant by “emergent property.”
Do you agree or disagree with this statement that AHunter3 made:
As I’m sure you can tell, this post has a bit of a theme addressing one question about how you think of deterministic universes, which I’d like to make as explicit as I can. Outside of sub-atomic physics (or the equivalent study of individual cells in the Game of Life) can there be any legitimate sciences, or are they just necessary approximations given our perpetual state of limited information about our universe? In the Game of Life, is there any good reason that beings who have no effective information limit (such as ourselves) concern themselves with the study of gliders, cannons, or other emergent phenomena?
Thank you. I did have a merry celebration. Happy New Year to Apos, Sapo, the PC apeman, AHunter3, DSeid, Frylock, Diogenes the Cynic and anyone else who has managed to fight their way onto the sixth page of this thread.
Oh, and AHunter3: “Even the dyxlexic agnostic is forced to acknowledge that there really is a dog.” Absolutely beautiful.
Doesn’t the universe provide its own statement to itself simply by being as it is? How can the universe not be exact enough for itself?
Whose focus? The universe’s? Mechanisms needn’t focus on anything to operate.
First let’s get a clearer definition of determinism: Determinism is the philosophical proposition that every event, including human cognition and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences. No wholly random, spontaneous, mysterious, or miraculous events occur, according to this philosophy.Secondly, how does non-reversibility disprove causality moving forward? As you pointed out with the Game of Life, systems needn’t be reversible to be completely deterministic.
I’d very much like to know what you think the missing principle is. So far, I don’t think you’ve presented it.
Less real? Absolutely. Less useful? No. The gliders and movement exist only in our minds. In the GoL universe, they are no more than coincidental two-state cells abiding by four simple deterministic rules. But because the gliders and movement do exist in our minds, we can discuss them as if they are real. This is the utility of discussing a collection of atoms as a “dog” that I spoke to Ahunter3 about. It is the utility of discussing human will as though we have choices.
We agree. There is no missing principle. Determinism allows us understanding all the way back to the beginning of the universe. There is no need to introduce any non-physcialist entities from the beginning of the universe forward.
This will be misleading, but I would say that emergent properties are failures of our minds to accurately portray what is really being sensed. It’s misleading because “failure” is often pejorative. Emergence is a great example of a “bug” being a “feature” if you know what I mean. This feature is a big part of what makes us amazingly, fascinatingly wondrous (if only to ourselves).
I would say that one useful way of understanding a phenomenon doesn’t necessarily deny the utility of another way.
Please tell me that this discussion of free will isn’t just the proxy of an argument for a god.
By that logic, atoms do not, of course, exist either (except in our minds). At the smallest level of analysis we can say anything about, they appear to exist only as the relationships between zones of probability of momentary vacuum fluctuations. Each specific vacuum fluctuation occurs for no prior reason, not in any linear deterministic causal sense, although it is fair to say that collectively and statistically the fluctuations occurring in one femtosecond appear to affect the probabilities governing the fluctuations occurring in the next. On the other hand, just to throw a spanner into the works, the fluctuations occurring in the next femtosecond may exert a governing effect on the fluctuations occurring in this one.
While it looks a bit problematic to describe the behavior and features of “dog” as a consequence of what atoms are doing as a verb, you are to be commended for sticking to your guns and claiming that nevertheless, the “dog” is no more than a useful construct of the mind, and that only the components of which such constructs are comprised can be considered truly “real”.
But I think you’re boxing yourself into a corner from which linear determinism is less and less defensible the more our particle physics advances in knowledge and comprehension. Would you care to try to explain how causal determinism from status quo ante causing status quo is validated by understanding the dog to be composed of a whole lot of nothing spontaneously dividing itself up into bits of non-nothing that cancel each other out? Or how it is composed of interactions and relationships that less and less seem to be interactions and relationships between things, and more and more like relationships between processes which are constittued of relationships with “particles” being a larger-scale illusion that they perpetrate? It would appear that the verb is more fundamental than the noun after all when all is said and done.
Dr. Love and I are able to exchange the ideas in this thread because we start from similar causation and physicalism foundation. We can depart from there. What sort of conversation could we have if we started from the deeper level you suggest?
You and I have already discussed free will so I know your position. It is a circularly-defined undifferentiated universe where everything is imaginary. And, as I pointed out in your MOQ-like thread, I find requiring such a solipsistic starting point akin to a thermonuclear debate-ending bomb. It’s like Dr. Love and I were debating the finer points of Coke versus Pepsi and you chimed in with the fact that they’re both probabilistic illusions and it didn’t really matter. Got it. Understood. Game over. Thank you for playing. But if you care to join us on the foundation of physicalism and causality, then the debate is on again.
I find a satisfying degree of coherence (and therefore utility) among my many ideas right down to approaching Planck scale of time and space - that is, right down to the limits of our understanding of physics. Other philosophies don’t get me there. As to what’s beyond that barrier I cannot say. It’s beyond my understanding.
So you don’t know, but rather take it on faith, that you live in a deterministic universe. Got it.
I have no problem with that whatsoever, only with determinists taking the position that their perspective is compellingly the correct one to hold and that people who do not share it are delusional, etc.
Absolutely beautiful.