Sort of yes…but also sort of no. Say I’m on a diet, but there’s this immense glazed cream-filled doughnut in the store window… I buy it and eat it, fully knowing I’m doing the wrong thing. It happens.
I can’t point to the exact place, but it exists: dogs and cats have free will…and insects don’t. So, somewhere in between. (I’m not sure about reptiles and amphibians. Do alligators have volition?)
For FW and sentience both I suspect that there is no specific place, no threshold of cognitive complexity that marks the borderline. It is matters of degree, not completely a gradient because possibly also of different types. Mostly what we do is make guesses. We experience intentionality and conscious decision making within our own minds (or at least think we do) and so assume that others who look, act, and are constructed like us do as well. Probably not too unreasonable of a leap. It is the basis of each of us having a Theory of the Mind of others and much of human interaction and even religion is predicated upon that (see the Science article above). But making that assumptive leap to a different form of intelligence, an alien cognition, an artificial one? Harder to do and, at this point, we have no way to measure. Are octopuses, quite intelligent, sentient? Do they have Free Will or perhaps less controversially, do they experience some comparable sensation of intentionality, of a self making decisions? How about whales? Going further out there, what about the hive-mind of an ant colony or a bee hive?
Unless and until we develop an understanding of what patterns of information processing lead to the sensation of self, of consciousness, of free will, and how to measure its degree, we have no metric to use. AHunter has made this point already of course.
I do not believe that intelligence requires sentience and not all choices made are made of will. But, and here I do disagree with AHunter, FW is part and parcel of a sentient intelligence making choices, not in isolation, but in response to a variety of changing inputs, or to put it as monstro does, things, multiple different things, changing OUTSIDE its own constantly changing self.
And I agree with Lamia “that if your goal is improve your ability to make good choices then exploring this issue will probably be of little value to you.”
OTOH if your goal is to have some philosophical cover for what your beliefs already are … sure, go at it!
I’m finding this thread refreshing in the extent to which people of very divergent viewpoints seem to actually be listening to each other instead of just trying to win an argument. (And I apologize if I’m posting too profusely as a consequence of my enjoyment of it).
Kitty cat: definitely
Mosquito or housefly: a whole lot less confident on that. I swear I’ve seen them behave as if they were taking in the fact that I was trying to swat them, not just in the immediate moment but for the next 20 @##^@#! minutes. And laughing at me.
I’ve said before that I think our species is guilty of really egregious homo sapiens chauvinism. Still…houseflies and mosquitos? Can I really credit them with awareness and deliberate intentional reactions to things? I’m not certain. I’m strongly inclined to think not, and yet I still am not comfortable treating them as if they were just biological machinery. There’s still a residual sense on my part that maybe they value their life and experience emotions or something akin to emotions that attaches to their experience of being alive. I’m probably just anthropomorphizing, I dunno.
Bacteria? Uh uh. I really don’t know where I draw the line but if bacteria is alive and possesses free will, then so do the freaking rocks.
There is a sense in which the universe does exist as a whole, and consciousness, insofar as it does exist, is a characteristic of the universe as a whole. But there’s a logical fallacy, I think it’s called the fallacy of composition, in which you say that since AHunter3 is conscious and his foot is a part of him, his foot is therefore conscious. It’s not.
Now, about the conscious mind and the unconscious mind and all that: honestly, the thingie that we conceptualize as the conscious mind in humans is basically the verbal mind. We possess language. It’s a tool that lets us stick a term onto a fairly complex concept and then use that term in an expression and thus build up some impressively complex thoughts. Most other animals do not appear to have the capacity for formulate language-structured thought. (I don’t think there is as of yet any compelling evidence that any other earthly species does, although there’s some debate and some grey area and some uncertainty there). Does that mean they don’t decide, think, have awareness? I don’t think so, not at all. We are born without language and only acquire it afterwards; our unlanguaged starting point is, I think, the biggest factor in why we generally don’t recall those early months of our lives. And yet our minds at that stage possess the ability to recognize patterns (sufficiently well to pick up language from speaking people around us, at an absolute minimum!). We have desires and intents and wants and choices, oh yeah, do we ever.
Feelings are cognitions.
That’s what we call our preverbal mental processes as we experience them: “feelings”. They are understandings. I consider any creature capable of having feelings to be at least potentially a creature of free will. If they can feel things they can most likely formulate an intention and act upon it.
You ever seen this video about the crow? I see no reason to doubt that this critter has formulated an intent, and processes information to create a plan of action, and is acting accordingly, pursuing its own wishes. Free will.
If we create androids and we do not program them directly to assert that they have free will, but one of them nevertheless makes that assertion and delivers an impassioned speech to me about its intrinsic self-worth and the existence of its self-determination, I’ll take it at its word.
You contemplate doughnut. On the one hand, there is the good of staying on your diet. On the other hand there is the good of eating a doughnut which would taste yummy right now. You may later criticize your own tendency to opt for short-term happiness over long-term best interests, but at the moment you decide to buy and eat it, your internal vote is that it is more good to eat doughnut than to stay on diet.
As I’ve said before, the conscious / verbal mind is not the supreme or only relevant part of your mind. It’s the part most capable of incredibly complex mental structures, but it’s also the part most susceptible to internalizing ideas from other people, which is the most social-determistic part of our minds when you come right down to it. The raw feeling part is often much more in touch with what you want (i.e., value as good for yourself) as opposed to what you have decided that you should want (i.e., believe intellectually to be good for yourself).
Good point!
You are entirely correct, and I need to edit my assertions thusly:
I have a notion of what my kitty cat is like internally, and what other people are like internally. I could be wrong about those notions — I can’t claim to know from direct experience, and it’s all extrapolation from external observations.
Within those limitations, I consider them, and you, to be creatures of free will.
Really tiny nitpick, but you said “right” earlier, with which I do not agree, but here you say “good,” with which I completely agree.
With this, I wholly and completely agree. (Well, at least the conscious parts of my decision-making apparatus!) 
I largely agree with the OP: the free will debate is something of a waste of time, but for slightly different reasons: I think the definition of free will is incoherent, plus people have misconceptions about Determinism.
So the debate is “Something which doesn’t make sense” Vs “An incorrect idea about Determinism”
For the purpose of this post I’ll just briefly say what I mean by free will not making sense.
It doesn’t make sense because it’s defined in a way where it must be a decision made based on past events and preferences (because e.g. throwing in a random factor doesn’t satisfy many people’s idea of being “free”) but at the same time cannot be based on the past because then that’s Determinism.
I mean, the idea that if you could somehow rewind the universe, put everything back as it was, including your brain state, and expect you to behave differently makes zero sense. Why would you?
The misconception about Determinism is linking it with Fatalism. So the idea that if you’re mulling over whether to drink coffee or tea, those thought processes are somehow “fake” as the decision was already made. Rather than the decision being the product of those thought processes.
This is often coupled with misleading hypotheticals such as a photon striking the retina causing A which causes B. When obviously the real pathway between events in the world and my decisions would be impossible to chart and is based upon years of diverse experiences and complex internal models.
Yes, I continue to enjoy it even as it moves beyond the questions I originally had. I think it has stayed reasonable in part because the question is not positioned as a debate. I am asking how to use the debate, and POVs within it, in our lives. I think folks started offering their definitions as context for discussing use. Kept things more civil ;). Hadn’t thought of any of that, but I’ll take it.
The fact that many of us use this Big Idea in our lives similarly is something we can start with even while we approach it very differently.
By the way Lamia - yes, thinking through this thread, I can see I am focused on practical thinking, locus of control type issues.
WordMan, one way to approach the question is:
Do you think those people who think clearly and precisely and thoroughly about the definitions they use can consistently make better choices than they would otherwise? Do you think those people who take the time to learn how other people are defining the words that they use are going to benefit from this method of thought?
That’s one possible practical question that relates to this thread (although there are others).
And I can see people go either way on this. Pretty sure more than one poster has already posited that there is most likely no real practical benefit to working through this sort of philosophical issue. I understand that, and I can respect that. We have compartmentalized minds. We have walls between the things we believe that we know. Those walls are high, and studying one topic does not necessarily mean any beneficial spillovers into other areas.
But I personally can’t help but believe – not based on too terribly much evidence, but nevertheless – that people who can focus on the meat of the issue on this one topic are likely to be able to do the same on other, more practical topics. Now, it could be the case that certain people are just generally better at this skill at a fundamental level, which means they’re good at it regardless of the topic. They didn’t learn that practical skill from this one topic. Maybe they learned it elsewhere, and it just so happens to apply well in a highfalutin philosophical discussion.
But I personally believe it’s possible for a person who is sufficiently curious to make a sort of mental breakthrough about how words like “determinism” are actually defined. This has been a problem in this thread. It’s always a problem in these threads. As Mijin said in post 127:
And this is really the prime issue.
Unlike free will, which seems to have as many different definitions as there are posters who claim to believe in it, causal determinism is actually well defined. There is no room for fuzziness. It is absolutely clear what it is, and how it works, and how to identify a deterministic system from a non-deterministic system when looking at that system from the outside. (It is not possible to recognize a deterministic system from the inside, which is entirely the problem.)
Causal determinism is as well defined as any human concept can possibly get. And it’s a simple definition!
Yet people still get it wrong. More than one person in this thread has made what seem like basic mistakes.
Are there any practical benefit to working through these kinds of philosophical issues to dig through these kinds of errors? Well… maybe. It depends on whether you believe, first, whether people who have made basic mistakes about definitions can admit their obvious errors (and I can cite at least one person who has been dogmatically ignorant for literally years on a very simple question of fact); and second, whether you believe someone who successfully recognizes their basic definitional error in this particular topic will benefit from that revelation with the spillover effect, by making “better” decisions in other “more practical” topics. I would say that the chances of both of those events happening is very small. In all likelihood, there is most probably no benefit to the vast majority of people from these sort of highfalutin discussions.
But still. I think there can be exceptions.
The basic definition of determinism in the sciences is just the chain of “cause and effect”.
Okay, then, we can ask ourselves, what is “cause and effect”? That’s simple, too. It means that the physical system evolves in a fixed way according to basic rules. Think of it like a flow chart. Everyone has seen flow charts. All that determinism means is that there is one arrow that comes out of every box. If you’re in a box, there is only one way that the system can go to get out of that box. That is the essence of a cause and an effect system. At its core, it really is as simple as that.
If you’re in box 1, then the next box that you’re in is 2. And if you’re in box 2, then the next box you’re in is 3. That’s it. That’s determinism. There is a fixed rule about the one place where you can when you’re in each box. Every time you’re in box A, then the next box is B. Every time you’re in box F, then you’re next box is G.
In physics, this basic idea can be expressed mathematically with a continuous function, which is to say: an infinite number of boxes. That sounds complicated. Well hell, it is complicated. But we can still approach an infinite number of boxes from an easier perspective. Take a piece of paper, and draw a curve corresponding to y(t) = t^2. Or even simpler, draw a simple line where y = x.
There are an infinite number of points on that curve, right? Sure. But nevertheless, where the line is going to be in the future is still completely well defined. When the state of the line is at time t=0, there is no ambiguity about which “box” the line will be at two seconds later. If we know where we are at the bottom of the parabola, then we should know where the parabola is going in the “future”. We human beings can create a deterministic mathematical system, and if we’re asked, okay, this system is in Box B two seconds into the run-time, then where will the system be when it goes another six seconds? We look at the equations, we crunch the numbers, and – if the deterministic system is simple enough! – we can calculate the position where the system will be. It’s complicated, yes, but the reasoning with equations is still exactly the same sort of reasoning as from the flow chart. If you know that we’re starting with box D, then we just need to find out where the equations are telling us to go with box E and F and so on.
Follow the clearly defined rules to find the next box. That is determinism. That is all it is.
Now notice what we are not saying here. We are not saying that all deterministic systems are fully predictable. The vast majority of them are not. Let me repeat that, in case it wasn’t clear: we cannot predict the future values for the vast majority of deterministic systems that we could create. Why? Well, just think about a VERY BIG flow chart. We might know that we’re in box C, and we might be looking for box D on this chart, but the chart is so big that box D is somewhere near the center of the Milky Way galaxy. We cannot yet get to that box to read what will happen in box D.
We can tell that this is a deterministic system. We can see box C, and we can see the clear deterministic rule from saying that the next box is thattaway, in that direction. But the flow chart is so big that we simply can’t follow where that line goes. In computational terms, what this means is that if we set up a computer to approximate this deterministic system, our beautiful sun will burn out before the computer could finish its calculations. We wrote a computer program to run this deterministic system. Sure. We can do that. And we know it’s deterministic, because the system is well defined as it’s being programmed into the computer. Determinism is about well defined causal chains. Everything in the system runs according to fixed rules. Nevertheless! We still cannot predict where this system will go because we simply don’t have the computational power to “follow the flow chart”. The math problem is too hard for the computer to run it in less than 10 billion years. The flow chart is, so to speak, too large for us to read the entire thing.
This is why computer metaphors are so common in these discussions. It’s the power of computation that, finally, gave us the key to unlock our understanding of the limits of predicting deterministic systems. Physicists used to believe that if they had the equations to describe the world, then they’d be able to predict… well, pretty much anything.
It was only after the computer era that it fully sank in, on a gut level for the people who work with these kinds of deterministic systems, that the vast majority of these systems are not computable within the human lifetime. Or even within the earth’s lifetime. If we had the processing power, we could predict the future. But we don’t. And then the even more staggering realization: our processing power comes from computers that exist inside this universe. They are, thus, necessarily smaller than the universe as a whole. It’s a necessary result, that even if our universe happens to be deterministic, that any computer inside of the universe cannot run a simulation of the universe that it is in. A computer that is smaller than the world cannot simulate the entire world. Can’t be done. Agents within a deterministic universe must necessarily remain mired in ignorance of what will happen next.
The question is, then, what kinds of deterministic systems can we simulate? Well, only very simple ones right now. But nevertheless, we can learn quite a bit from those simple deterministic systems if we try.
One thing we can do is, for example, create miniature civilizations. Like computer games, but without any player input. It’s a simulation that repeats the same outcome over and over again, every time it’s played. That is a deterministic system.
And an interesting thought experiment is to have multiple programmers. There might be World-Programmers who create the simulated game world, and Agent-Programmers who create the best little robot they can to navigate the game world. The Agent-Programmers might not even know the full details of the world that their poor little agent will be dropped into. So they have to create an agent which has some small chance of survival in a variety of different worlds. They have to create an agent that will react to what it sees in different kinds of worlds.
World+Agent is a deterministic system. Every time the system is run, the same outcome will happen. The agent will make the same choices every time. But nevertheless, we are free to call the agent’s “decisions” by that very name. No other word is appropriate. We know that if the agent were dropped in World2, after all, their decisions would be different.
World+Agent is a deterministic system. It plays out the same way every time it is run. World2+Agent is also a deterministic system. It plays out the same way every time the simulation is run. Yet the agent makes different choices in the different worlds, as a result of experiencing different input. The deterministic system is not the World by itself, and not the Agent by itself, but the combination of the two together. The chain of cause-and-effect can work out very differently, even with an identical “person”.
Yet in this thread, we’ve had the claim that in a deterministic world, there are no “actual” decisions. That just makes no sense. Of course there are decisions. How could there not be decisions? As said earlier in this thread:
There can be a (deterministic agent) trying to to optimize their experience based on limited information, embedded inside a (deterministic) world that follows a strict chain of cause and effect based on fixed rules, but that agent will be clearly making decisions. Given a slightly different (deterministic) world, the agent will make different decisions.
That fits any definition of decision I’ve ever seen… at least when “decision” is also defined in a clear way, as determinism is so defined.
It’s my belief that working through these sorts of hypotheticals can clear up a lot of previously fuzzy thinking about the nature of our definitions. We seem to have as many definitions of free will as we do posters. We seem, also, to have plenty of misconceptions about extremely well defined concepts like causal determinism.
If just one person reads through these sorts of ideas – except written better than in my post here – and has that light-bulb moment, then yeah. I think that person has a chance to reflect more carefully on definitions in other topics, and maybe – on rare occasions – to make better choices based on a clearer understanding of what a choice actually represents in a deterministic world. Our choices matter because our choices are part of the causal chain. We know that we would make very different choices if suddenly embedded in a different causal chain, because we can see the same thing happening on a much smaller scale.
I appreciate Mjin and Hellestal chiming in. Hopefully their posts will flip a switch in the minds of the FW-espousing folks here and elicit a cascade of better understanding.
Hellestal - I actually read all that 
and will do so again. I see you have been around for a number of years, but have very few posts. Nice to see a chewy thread like this got you engaged!
First of all, I agree with the assertion that noodling about this stuff adds value. Hence this and other Big Idea threads I have started over the years.
Secondly, you seem to be framing Determinism to include the behaviors of the Agent, i.e., what a person acting may perceive as Free Will is really part of a meta-Deterministic System. ???
Cool. To me that is a form of saying that Free Will is illusory, something I have indicated a willingness to roll with as part of my noodling about the everyday usefulness of the ponder. I definitely enjoy…grokking? the concept that my Free Will is an evolutionary byproduct of mental organization, even while I am aware of the Cogito Ergo Sum* feeling I feel as a brute fact of life.
*by the way, I suspect it should really be Cogito Cogito, Ergo Cogito Sum
[QUOTE=Hellestal]
causal determinism is actually well defined
[/quote]
Not entirely, no, especially when applied to this subject matter
• There is the false notion of exclusivity — the notion that if it is valid to describe something one way, a differing description is wrong. A causal deterministic description of the universe is geared towards prediction and it’s a model that works quite well, but it’s success as a model does not necessitate that any conflicting or contrasting models have to be wrong. See post 61. Insofar as deterministic models of human behavior do not tend merely to assert that “you can come up with deterministic explanations for human behavior” but rather “the ONLY or (or ‘real’) explanation for human behavior lies in causal determinism”, this is a fallacy embedded in the deterministic model.
• There is the identification of variables problem —it isn’t really valid to make the observation that external stimuli elicit a predicted response from a subject and then conclude that the stimuli, and not the subject’s intentions or choices, is the cause of the response, unless the stimuli does not itself INCLUDE the subject and therefore the subject’s intentions and choices etc. See above discussion of the figure-ground problem. If you include the entirety of my life’s experience up to a specified point and attempt to posit it as the cause of my behavior at that point, you’ve incorporated my model’s candidate for independent variable into yours due to the figure-ground issue.
…
This is true.
It also has nothing to do with my post.
I didn’t offer a causal deterministic description of the universe. I merely defined determinism.
This also has nothing to do with my post.
I didn’t offer a “deterministic model” of human behavior.
If I had offered a “deterministic model” of human behavior, I certainly would not have said that it was the only possible explanation, because such a claim would be deeply silly.
This also has nothing to do with my post.
It’s possible you intended to respond to someone else, and hit the wrong button. If you wish to respond to my post, you will need to bring up topics that I actually discussed.
I defined determinism in my post. I then used examples to illustrate the definition. If you believe you have a problem with the definition, you will have to engage that definition directly.
Um, how’d I do, Professor Hellestal?
Seriously - did I do okay with my take on what you are doing by defining Determinism that rigorously?
Haha, you engaged what I actually wrote. That’s an A in my book.
You also said you were going to read it again, so I guess I thought I’d wait on that if you had other thoughts. But I can go through this now:
Yes.
When you’re defining a deterministic system, you need to include everything in the system. Everything causes everything else. Everything affects everything else. If a bunch of programmers create World1 and then run that system, it will run a certain way. Assuming no computer problems, it will run the same way every time. As I said, the definition of determinism is very simple* and very clearly defined. It just follows the rules. It just follows the chain of causation.
When somebody then plops a new agent into World1, what we’ve created is an entirely different deterministic system. It is no longer World1. The new system is now World1+Agent. When you run this system, it will run the same way every time. (This is just another way of saying determinism is perfectly well defined. That’s what makes it so easy to work with. It will do the same thing every time, because it follows fixed rules.) But this new deterministic system, World1+Agent, is not the same system that it was before. This is a different deterministic system. The “story” that unfolds in this new simulated world will be different from whatever story used to unfold before the rock of the agent was dropped into the pond.
In an actual pond, the ripples eventually subside. But in a chaotic deterministic system – and chaos theory, if you’re not aware, is actually about deterministic systems – instead of the ripples getting smaller and smaller over time, they actually get bigger. The end result of the “story” could be significantly different with only the smallest change in initial conditions.
(*It’s important to make the distinction here between simple and easy.
The definition of determinism is very simple. But it is not very easy – as evidence from this thread attests quite well. Walking from one side to the other on the girders on top of an unfinished 100-story skyscraper is very simple. Just one foot in front of the other, simple as can be. But it is not easy. I’m afraid of heights. The task is simple, but maybe impossible for someone like me, even if I were offered a million dollars.
That’s what we’re dealing with here. Determinism is very clearly, very simply defined. It’s just a flow chart with one arrow only out of each box. That’s it. That’s all. But that’s still not an easy thing to wrap our heads around, because we are dealing with so. insanely. many. boxes.)
I don’t actually like talking about “free will”, and try to avoid the term whenever possible.
It is not well defined, unlike some other terms. Every person who believes in it seems to believe in a completely different thing.
Obviously human beings experience something when we make decisions. Let’s call this subjective experience eff-doubleyuu. I wouldn’t call this experience an “illusion” if people feel it, no more than anger or sadness or joy are illusions. These are all real experiences. But here is the question: can our experience of eff-doubleyuu tell us anything about the physics of the universe in which we are embedded and are a part of? That is to say, can a person say that they experience eff-doubleyuu, so therefore the physics of our world must absolutely follow such-and-such rules? I would say no, absolutely not. Our subjective experience of anger obviously does not inform us about the workings of electrons. Nor does the very real experience of eff-doubleyuu inform us about anything at all of how this world of ours actually functions.
If someone says they believe in some hazy incoherent concept, my first question is, okay, what is the physics of that? How is it defined? How does it work?
I think the universe is probably deterministic. (That is the first time I’ve said that in this thread.) I’m not 100% certain about that. It’s just my best guess. And if someone asks me how I think human decisions are probably made, I’m going to say it might be some higher manifestation of the deterministic evolution of a universal wavefunction. Do I know that to be true? Of course not. Just my best guess right now.
I’m open to alternatives.
Preferably I would want those alternatives to be well defined. That is never the case, in my experience. Now here’s an important addendum: I’m not totally convinced that the universe can be well defined in such a way that a human brain can understand it. I’m definitely open to that possibility. But in that case… why are people trying to argue about concepts that they can’t even define?
If the idea is truly beyond us, then we have no way of talking about it anyway.
If the idea is not beyond us, then let’s start with clear definitions. The advantage of talking about determinism is that it is clearly defined.
That concept of a simulated game programmed by one set of people, into which a simulated agent programmed by a different group of people, is I think one possible way of untangling the weirdness of deterministic systems. It’s a way of explaining how an agent can be embedded in a system in which, first, they don’t know all the rules; yet second, they have goals they want to accomplish; and third, they need to make the best decision they can about how to accomplish those goals given the limitations of their knowledge.
And what’s very, very interesting about this is that their very decisions are part of the system. The simulation runs the same way every time it’s run, but adding one tiny change – one more agent into the mix – can completely and totally change the final outcome of a fully deterministic system. The ripples in the pond that are their choices don’t dissipate. They become tsunamis that wash over the entire world.
All good. I held off commenting further until I checked my take. I also try to keep my responses short, if only as a discipline to remind myself I should be listening more than talking in threads like these.
I will take the same approach here in commenting on your latest longer post. All of that makes sense in framing the Deterministic gears in the model.
I appreciate the articulation of stuff like this. I do need to think more about the different “Realities” that exist in our Consciousness - material, subjective thought, and Forms/Numbers.
Maybe true but if so as equally true for those who can focus on the meat of organic chemistry or Shakespeare. The subject itself is not the potential marker for the ability to focus but the fact that an individual can focus on a subject that may not be straightforward to them at first take, and that the person is, presumptively, demonstrating both intellectual curiosity and an open mind.
So let’s discuss causal determinism out of the context of FW.
So is the universe at its core a strictly deterministic system? At the most basic levels is there only one way out of each most basic boxes or do the most widely accepted scientific models of those most basic levels posit that those basic boxes are stochastic processes with multiple ways out of each box? Say a box with a cat, poison, a geiger counter, radioactive material, and a hammer in it?
At those basic levels apparently ruled by quantum superposition is what would be observed upon opening the box something that even theoretically, given as much computational power as the universe minus that box can provide, predict, other than as a probability distribution of possible outcomes?
Put into the phrasing of your post, at that most fundamental level is the universe currently best described as a continuous function with f(x)=y at every point, or does it actually not meet that most basic definition of a function that each input have exactly only one output?
If we were able to run the universe over again from the exact point of the Big Bang would the exact same universe result, or would those truly random variations at the quantum level result in different paths taken?
Most physicists today would say not, that basic processes subject to quantum superposition, mean that waveform collapse of the same exact system may be a different result than another.
If they are right then at its core the universe is not a strictly deterministic system. Moreover the universe is a massively (the most massive in fact) dynamic nonlinear system. What we know from chaos theory is that for large dynamic non-linear systems the slightest difference in start states can mean very divergent results and even more divergent and varied paths to get there. (Indeed noted that the paths themselves are deterministic.)
To parallel your post in the converse, the universe not being truly deterministic at its most basic level does not mean that it is not, theoretically, predictable. Chaos theory is often misunderstood to mean that such chaotic systems are therefore unpredictable when it instead is all about probabilistically predicting likely outcomes. The system that is the universe may have various attractor basins and systems contained within often certainly do. But his is predictability as a matter of probability, not as a clear flow chart where A can only result in B.
Your post goes on to the meaning of the word “decision” and I could use some clarification from you.
An E. coli bacterium has two states of movement: run or tumble. If the concentration gradient of its food supply is increasing over time in motion it decreases tumble and therefore is more likely to continue to travel in a straight line. Given slightly different inputs the bacterium will move in different directions. Does that qualify as “decision” in your use of the term? It certainly would seem so. Is there, to you, any difference between that sort of decision, and the decision made a by a sentient intelligence experienced as a volitional choice?
Which moves *into *the issue of what is experienced as Free Will.
Well first into the transition from a system being or not being ultimately causally determinant into being able to the emergent properties of the system. Would our imagined supercomputer much larger than our universe, situated outside our universe, that could, under a Bohmian QM model calculate out the position and state of every atom from the BiG Bang to now be able to predict emergent properties like wetness? Possibly. Would it be able to predict what “red” was perceived as? How sadness was to experience? Would it be able to predict what volition felt like? What a sentient self felt like to be? I am not sure. What do you think?
Minimally our extrauniversal supercomputer would also have to be able to describe the same events at another level of analysis to “see” the impact of sentience and perceived volition, the conscious perception of freely making a choice and experiencing it as originating as something of them on evolutionary fitness.
Again I’ll come from the converse - does the physics of the universe automatically tell us anything about the subjective experience? Your statement “Nor does the very real experience of eff-doubleyuu inform us about anything at all of how this world of ours actually functions” appears to place a value that the physics is more valid a descriptor than the very real experience. Is that what you meant? Why is one a more valid level of analysis than the other? Especially when one is discussing primarily that which is contained within the realm of subjective experiences.
Oh this deserved a specific response as well.
We talk about concepts we are struggling to understand and may not be able to comprehend because we that is how we attempt to develop the tools.
And of course sometimes people are looking for intellectual justifications for what they already believe. That one is sort of like when the subconscious has already made a decision and the conscious brain makes up a just-so story for why it did that. (My appropriately ignored bad joke I made discussing that the big ideas of “I think therefore …” are sometime falsely put as preceding ideas about morality such as that prostitution is “wrong” … the mistake of putting Descartes before the whores.)
I believe so, yes.
Supporting that position, to whatever weak extent I’d be able to do so, would take a much longer argument than my already long attempt to define and explain the term.
There have already been some fundamental mistakes made in this thread – and frankly, in nearly every thread on this topic – about how deterministic systems work. I couldn’t begin to make a case that this world is deterministic – not even a bad case – if half the people don’t understand what that means.
The entire point of the various deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics is that there is no such thing as any “truly random” variations at the quantum level. (In a philosophical sense, “random” is another one of those words that is extremely hard to define. On the deepest levels, I have yet to see a sensible definition.)
The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is deterministic. From our narrow personal viewpoint it might look like we had a 50/50 chance of outcome A happening, or outcome B happening, but it’s possible that BOTH outcome A happened, and ALSO outcome B happened, and they just happened in different “worlds”. What looks random to us is merely a limitation of our perspective, stuck as we are in one world. A different version of us is stuck in the other, pondering the other outcome that happened.
Another deterministic interpretation relies on hidden variables. It is not that “random” things happen. It’s that there is extra stuff going on under the surface – stuff that we cannot directly observe – that is fully determining the outcome of these strange processes. But we who lack this hidden information cannot see this deeper deterministic variable, and that’s why the outcome of quantum processes just look like random shit happening all over the place.
If the universe of deterministic in such a way, then yes, it would play out in exactly the same way if it were “restarted” in the same initial conditions. That is what deterministic means.
From the last survey I saw of physicists at a quantum foundations conference – the people who might have given the question the most thought, rather than just regurgitating what their textbooks say – the Copenhagen interpretation is not actually the majority viewpoint. It’s just the plurality. And even that might be overstating the case.
It would have been interesting if support for Copenhagen could have been further subdivided, into people thinking the wavefunction collapse was “real” or whether it is just an epistemic marker. Take the famous quote that’s endlessly repeated: "If I were forced to sum up in one sentence what the Copenhagen interpretation says to me, it would be ‘Shut up and calculate!’ "
Shut up and calculate. That’s his interpretation of the Copenhagen interpretation.
Those are not the words of a person deeply interested in which interpretation is correct. That is a mechanic speaking. That is someone working with equations as a tool, plug and chug, get your answer, move on, don’t think about it. An enormous number of physicists are like that. (This shouldn’t really be surprising. I’m a macroeconomist. An enormous number of macroeconomists have no particular interest in the real economy.) Some physicists even go so far as to claim that discussions about the correct interpretation don’t even belong to the realm of science. To wonder how the world actually functions isn’t physics. It’s philosophy.
I do not share their definition of those words.
Current polling of physicists is a relevant data point. It’s also relevant, and important, that there is apparently no consensus among the physicists who particularly study quantum foundations.
This kind of probabilistic prediction is extremely powerful for real-world systems, where we lack perfect knowledge of initial states.
And yet chaos theory is nevertheless about deterministic systems. If you had perfect knowledge of the initial state (which means we’re not talking about reality here), then you would in fact know that A can only result in B. That is what deterministic means. (Or given a simulation of a system with no closed-form solution, you could approximate it to whatever degree of precision your computational power allowed.)
This is a great, perceptive question.
Map and territory is the answer.
Hypothetical programmed agents of the type I was describing would have a rudimentary model of the world they existed in. They would have a map in their head, which they would try to redraw to match the territory they inhabited. They could have beliefs about how their world actually works, they would act based on those beliefs, and most important, based on observation of their world, could potentially update those beliefs based on the new information they receive. (This is not a trivial problem. It is incredibly difficult.)
A bacterium has no internal structure that I know of (like a brain, or a string of data on a hard drive) which becomes correlated with the world as it interacts with the world, in exactly the way that my brain becomes correlated with the state of the world when I see my fly is down, and my brain updates its information about my current sartorial state. An agent in the World1 might come across the dragon, get badly burnt, and be very very careful about such beasties in the future. (Again, this is not an easy thing to implement. Far from it.)
If I’m wrong about bacteria, and some of them actually can update their “map” of the world based on previous experience, then I would absolutely call its subsequently actions “decisions”, since they were based on this new correlation with reality gained from interaction with reality. It would be decision making at roughly the same level as my thermostat.
I absolutely do believe it could. It wouldn’t even take an intelligence that large.
Again, I’m not saying I’m right about this. Naturally I think I’m right. Frankly, the following feels utterly “obvious” to the state of being boring, but I don’t trust that feeling. I’m just saying that this is how I approach this question, and I don’t see any other sensible (to me) way of approaching it.
If in this universe there were a very large brain – merely a few thousand times the smartest human should manage this – that existed in an organism that interacted with the world without light, and somehow it got to studying our species through whatever interactions it has with reality that correlate the state of its mind with reality (but not by means of the visible light spectrum) and then it simulated inside of itself what the experience of being human must be like, including our ability to see, then yes, I absolutely think it would finish that simulation by thinking something along the lines of, “Ah, so that’s what green looks like!”
Green is the experience of the properly calibrated algorithm.
I don’t yet understand this question, so I’ll read it again later. (But probably not respond tomorrow.)