Which just means that you can’t play the Game of Life backwards, at least not in the way it can be played forwards – there are no rules that uniquely define its backwards behaviour.
Hmm, that’s not how I read it. Seems like any prediction that just amounts to waiting around to see what happens is a rather trivial one – I mean, by those standards, I can predict Saturday’s lottery numbers, it’s just that I can’t tell you before Sunday.
Is that always the case, though? I seem to do countless things I can’t really say are connected with any sensation of agency – at least not in the sense that I have the feeling that I plan, set up, and then execute these actions. The precise movements of my fingers as I’m typing this, for instance, never seem to enter into consideration, nor did the way I just scratched my head; if I feel pain, I cry out involuntarily, and my thoughts and ideas just seem to come to me – there is no sense of originating them, of deliberating over their content before actualizing them as thought or idea, and how could there be, as to do so would be to be aware of them, to think them before they are thought. Actually, most of the things I do seem rather automated, in a way; they seem to happen to me more than they are done by me. I never choose what to think, I just think – I may then through these thoughts deliberate on some choice or another, like what to eat for breakfast, but in order to be able to do so, it seems necessary that the requisite thoughts first come to me.
But I think I get what you’re getting at: there seems to be a curious link between free will (or the appearance thereof) and conscious awareness – it seems there wouldn’t be anything to be aware of if there were no appearance of options, of choice. If everything just flows smoothly from cause to effect, how does the subjective experience of mental content come to be associated with it? It should be that as much as I am unaware of any reflexive action – fidgeting with a paper clip on my desk; changing the position of my feet slightly etc. – I ought to be unaware of every action, as it is just as reflexive, ultimately. As unconscious as I am of the processes that lead to my thoughts appearing within my mind, I should be of those thoughts as just being the processes that lead to me producing speech acts, or other actions.
Perhaps that’s upside down – perhaps it’s simply being conscious in a deterministic world that yields the appearance of possessing free will. A conscious state (or at least, a certain kind thereof) is something that’s directed towards something else, that has an intentionality, an aboutness. Perhaps there’s some gradation here: by virtue of being about something, it’s directed towards something, which leads to formulating intentions, and an appearance of choice. Perhaps it’s not that in the absence of choice, there’s nothing for mental content to be about, but rather that mental content being about something leads to the appearance of choice.
But is the backwards game of life random? Would it be accurate to describe Casablanca as a “random collection of still frames and sounds?”
How do you read it? All Laplace’s demon does is gather all the information and “submit these data to analysis” to get “a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom.” As I read it, Laplace’s demon puts all of the physical information into an enormous system of differential equations and solves them. If we believe that Laplace’s demon has the true laws of physics, then it seems to me that “setting up the system and watching it evolve” and “submit[ting] these data to analysis” are exactly the same thing, only expressed in different ways.
Trivial in this case, but it also solves the Andromeda problem. You can’t communicate your lottery prediction until the drawing is already in the past. Similarly, you are unable tell anyone of the Andromedans decision to invade until the decision is already in their past. The laws of physics allows for some intuitively strange facts, but also prevent us from acting on them.
No. That doesn’t work for me. We can *never *be in a position to completely describe their “microdynamics” - therefore they are stochastic. None of that “if we had infinite computronium” bullshit, either. At the level that they are happening (several orders of magnitude above the quantum), there’s no way to predict the path of a Brownian particle. Not practically, not theoretically, nothing. You might picture it as a smoke particle being Newtonianly knocked about by air particles like so many little perfect billiard balls, but that’s not what’s happening - all sorts of other forces are at play.
Which is, unfortunately, the level we have to be at to decide it’s a paradox. Only a privileged viewpoint allows us to talk about their planes of simultaneity at all.
Also, yes, the person moving sees the invasion started when the stationary person hasn’t seen it happen yet. But only when they compare notes, and when they do, P[sub]M[/sub] would also have to note that his days are actually shorter than thjose of P[sub]S[/sub], and when you take account of that difference, the launch event is simultaneous. And which convo can only happen after the event described. So no determinacy there, just variant descriptions of what already happened.
And neither of those actually matters in regards to determinacy. Because the question of determinacy should only be about the events in Andromeda’s plane of simultaneity. What happens in other PoSes happens, effectively, in another universe completely.
So ultimately, the Andromeda Paradox is saying that, from a perspective outside time determinacy exists. Well, sure, I’m not going to argue with that, other than to note that that’s a *particularly *privileged viewpoint we’re talking about, one that can’t actually exist according to Relativity as I understand it. So fine, things are deterministic if viewed from outside the Universe. I can live with that.
If you make an arbitrary choice regarding which possible progenitor state to evolve to, yes. If you read off the state to evolve to from a previously recorded evolution, no – but then, what you’re doing is not ‘playing the game of life’, but ‘reading off the next state from a list’, which is deterministic.
Sorry, I don’t get the analogy?
The thing is, in general, these differential equations won’t be solvable. In finite time, he can only compute a finitely accurate approximation, which entails a growing error the farther you go into the future. But there’s a more fundamental issue: for any sufficiently complex system, the demon’s task is equivalent to the halting problem, and for this problem, the best he can do is to solve it correctly for those programs that do halt in finite time – but for those that don’t, he won’t ever arrive at an answer.
The Andromeda paradox is not about what any one observer knows, but about causal consequences. The decision of the Andromedans to invade is as legitimately past to the one observer as the moment five minutes ago on the surface of the sun is to us – even though we have no knowledge of it. But if in roughly three minutes, a wave of neutrinos corresponding to some particularly strong solar flare hits us, we know that that flare occurred some eight minutes ago, and that the neutrino wave was already on its way three minutes ago – which means ‘five minutes ago on the surface of the sun’ is a very real and determinate event, and so are both 1) the Andromedans holding council, and 2) the Andromedan fleet launching – or in fact any other point in spacetime.
You can actually do computer simulations in which deterministically interacting particles yield Brownian motion. It’s a complex, but finite, and completely deterministic system – all of the individual interactions are deterministic; there’s no way for stochasticity to just suddenly emerge. It’s a pure artefact of our ignorance.
Like what? I mean, of course you could propose some inherent randomness that suddenly acts up, but actually assuming Newtonian billard interactions yields exactly the picture of Brownian motion we see, and according to what we know, there’s nothing else to it.
Only in as much as it requires a privileged viewpoint to talk about any physical dynamics – like you assume a ‘privileged viewpoint’ in talking about Keplerian ellipses of planet orbits, for instance. But this doesn’t constitute a privileged frame of reference in the relativistic sense; in fact, the Andromeda paradox only arises if we explicitly assume that all frames of reference are equally valid.
Nobody’s seen anything happen yet, and the question of who’s seen what is a complete red herring. The point is that if both observers now meet at the pub and wait for a rough two and a half million years, both will experience the Andromedan fleet invading – so the presence of the viewpoint from which the Andromedan fleet has already started necessitated that the observer in whose present the decision is apparently still up in the air eventually arrives at the point where he experiences the Andromedans invading; there was never any chance that, from the point in which the Andromedans still discuss, he arrives at a future in which they don’t invade.
Of course the launch event is simultaneous, relativity keeps causality intact. But the time dilatation merely ensures that both can ‘come together’ in the same present (i.e. that the way for one to reach that present is shorter than for the other, figuratively speaking) – say, when the Andromedans invade --, not that they in fact have had the same present moment in the past – since they were moving relative to one another, they didn’t.
So, you do not agree that what happened five minutes ago on the surface of the sun is determinate?
You can’t really talk about determinism if you only take a subset of the whole system into account – any interaction with the whole will then appear indeterministic; and other parts of space aren’t in another universe, as consequences of their past may affect your future. It would be like writing a computer program, which deterministically generates all possible sequences of dice throws, only to pick out one and using that to prove that your computer program can produce truly random, nondeterministic sequences.
But if they are (which incidentally isn’t what the Andromeda paradox is saying – rather, it says that if you take all frames of reference as equally valid descriptions, then, since some frames’ pasts include other frames’ futures (though not causal futures), the future must be determined), they’d have to be also deterministic within the universe, no? After all, that would mean that the future already exists – which is a statement independent of viewpoint.
Well, I think that this is just like the dice throw computer I mentioned in my last post: it’s a sample of a set that in its totality is deterministic, but appears indeterministic due to details being left out.
No, you can’t. You can do something that looks like Brownian motion, but computers don’t use true random numbers.
No, they’re not. See, I can argue by assertion too.
Of course there is. We know particle-particle interactions are both elastic and “sticky” in ways Newtonian mechanics doesn’t account for. And some of that elasticity and stickiness is stochastic. *Inherently *unpredictable. Because there’s no way to predict it inside this Universe.
…and then immediately go on to step outside every reference frame. Or how else can we talk about the future of the time-like curve?
I’m aware of that
You can only know this if you aren’t in* his* curve - or the other one. Hence specially privileged.
But they have different curves to get there. That’s my point. So they don’t have, effectively, any common measure to talk about what happened.
Are you asking if I think what happened on the Sun really, already happened even though I haven’t experienced it yet, and can’t happen differently now? Or something else? That sentence makes no sense to me. Care to rephrase your question?
What you’re talking about isn’t the equivalent to counting the whole system, it’s equivalent to stepping outside the Universe itself.
I get what it’s saying, but I don’t agree with it. The thing that, if you take its future, includes others pasts, is not a real thing. It exists only as a possible future. So you’re assuming determinacy by assuming the future of A will intersect the past of B. But you can only really tell that when A has caught up, in which case A’s present is B’s past, and where’s the determinacy in that? What you can’t have is the situation where B’s present is A’s future, as I understand it.
Which of course just means that one need not postulate randomness to account for Brownian motion.
I wasn’t making an argument, merely presenting what I take to be the consensus view on the matter. For interactions of two classical particles, we can exactly solve the equations of motion; interactions of n particles are just an n-fold iteration of this, which of course gets computationally intractable, but nowhere indeterministic.
Not sure how to make sense of this. Can you provide a cite for such non-Newtonian stickiness and elasticity, and how it applies to Brownian motion? And how, exactly, is stickiness stochastic?
Solving the equations of motion, of course. That’s not any more stepping outside of the reference frame than solving the equations of Newton’s gravity to get Keplerian orbits is.
What you’re essentially claiming in saying that the outcome of the Andromedan’s decision is not determined is that spatially distant events must on some level not be real; hence my question whether you think that what happened five minutes ago on the Sun is real – it’s spatially separated from us, and we will only know about it some three minutes from now, at the intersection of light rays emanating from the sun and with our worldline, which is equivalent to the observers learning about the Andromedan’s invasion two and a half million years from now at the earliest. So if you think that there’s an objective fact of the matter to what happened five minutes ago on the Sun, you should also accept that there’s an objective fact of the matter to what happens in Andromeda on Monday, as well as what happens on Tuesday, i.e. both the discussion and its outcome are equally real, and hence, the choice predetermined.
No, it’s merely providing an abstract description of some part of the universe – there’s no observer being postulated that somehow can ‘survey’ the whole universe, nor is one needed, anymore than talking about elliptic orbits postulates an observer somehow positioned above the solar system in order to ‘view’ them.
Perhaps introducing some quantum magic may help to convince you of the reality and validity of both observer’s viewpoints: Let’s suppose that both are in possession of one particle from a quantum entangled pair, the other one of which is situated in Andromeda in each case. While the discussion is in progress, some Andromedan scientist starts measuring the particle entangled with the stationary observer’s; as the fleet launches, some other Andromedan scientist commences measurement on the counterpart of the moving observer’s. Both the stationary and the moving observer measure their particle as they pass each other in the streets.
Now as the Andromedans arrive, the four of them – the two observers, and the two Andromedans – meet up at the local pub, where the two observers have at this point racked up quite an impressive tab, to compare notes – and find that there’s a perfect correlation between the measurements made during the debate and the measurements made by the stationary observer, as well as between the measurements made during launch and the measurements made by the moving observer.
What does this mean? Well, both groups must have made their measurements at the same time, during their respective shared present moments; which means that, in order for this to be possible, the present moment shared between the stationary observer and the Andromedan scientist present during the council had to evolve to the present moment shared between the moving observer and the scientist present during the launch; and in particular, the launch had to happen.
For yet another view, it’s really just the same as FTL being equivalent to time travel: imagine now both observer-Andromedan pairs equipped with some instantaneous communication device instead of EPR pairs. The Andromedan at the launch could now radio the moving observer that the fleet is launching, who could tell the stationary observer (or alternatively, could just stop moving himself), who in turn could radio the Andromedan present at the council, which would perhaps save some hours of fruitless discussion, the outcome of which is determined anyway.
You do not actually get to rewind your life in order to find out. (Let me know if you develop a working time machine). As a thought experiment, in order to conceptualize doing so, you have to already assume determinism (or assume otherwise) and either way that ends up constituting a begging-the-question problem. I can visualize myself rewinding my life and playing it back and having a totally different, divergent set of events transpire. (But not if I conceptualize it as being like a videotape, which does sort of assume determinism if you see what I mean).
Real answer? I experience life as a conscious person deciding. My consciousness cannot be an illusion to me (although the content of it could be illusory). As a conscious person deliberating, I can consider the idea of determinism, examining it as an explanatory structure for making sense of events. Certainly, in explaining behaviors that I observe which I do not attribute to my own actions and decisions, it seems to make sense that they are predicated on circumstances and inertias and contexts and whatnot that could be observed to exist prior to the behaviors in question. And projecting forward, such observations work well as predictives. But I don’t give primacy to determinism as an overarching descriptor for why things occur. In most cases I think determinism works because both “selves” and “events” (including “behaviors”) as we may perceive them are also, simultaneously, part of larger processes. The larger process is not the “cause” of the observable behavior of the smaller one (a fallacy similar to that of composition and division): the behavior of the cumulus cloud is not the reason for the behavior of the individual water molecule thereof, nor vice versa.
A prime example of this that is opaque to many people is the sense in which human consciousness is collective and unfolds over timeframes far exceeding the lifespan of any individual human. Conventional sociologists will readily speak of individual human motivations, attitudes, choices, etc, as the result of “socialization” and point out the extent to which such patterns are socially determined. But just because an enormous portion of the thinking in which individual people consider themselves to be engaged as individuals is actually a local & personal manifestation of the society mulling over that thought or idea over the course of a few centuries doesn’t mean that there is no true cognizant determiner thinking conscious thoughts. It’s just that “self” is considerably more distributed than we tend to consider it to be.
Determinists on this board are, I think, more likely to have their determinism rooted in physics than sociology, i.e., to point not so much at social determinism as material determinism. The inertia of mass and energy, universe as a big windup toy, the clockwork picture of the universe and all that. So they’d likely say “Yeah, but the entirety of human society is itself ‘caused’ by the larger context”. To which I would respond that “self” is considerably more distributed than they tend to consider it to be. Whatever consciousness, intentionality, and deliberate conscious causality is a subset of, it’s not something less aware and less personal, and this is something glimpsed and intuited now and then throughout the ages, badly explained (albeit with a lot of enthusiasm) by those who have done so, with results of questionable value (cf. “religion”), but regardless of how dimly we comprehend it and how poorly we explain it, it’s real enough: conscious deliberate determination — volition — does exist, in a manner not reducible to dependence upon other, prior, causal factors. Perhaps (paradoxically?) existing as a truth concurrent with causal determinism as an equally real truth, perhaps constituting the more primordial truth.
“Reading off the next state from a list” isn’t deterministic. The idea of determinism is that the next state follows logically from all the previous ones. This is the chain of causation that extends back to the big bang, and supposedly shows that choices are illusory in a deterministic universe. If we allow for reading the next state off a list, like watching a movie, then there’s no reason for there to be an unbroken causal chain, and thus no argument for incompatibilism.
Your example:
The film isn’t interacting with anything, it is only viewed. All the information about the states of the system (each frame of the movie) is there. What is missing?
Since the demon must be outside the universe, it’s not entirely clear how the time requirement for computation affects him. If he only has finitely accurate approximations, all that says is that Laplace’s demon is restricted to answering questions about finite time.
Not sure I get this – the list was created in a deterministic way, and my reading it is completely deterministic, too. You seem to presume that ‘reading the list’ is independent of its history, but as I said, one has to take into account the whole system in order to decide whether or not it is deterministic.
That which didn’t make it to the final cut, or which was never filmed in the first place. A film is one particular part of the (deterministic) events surrounding the making of the film – the actor’s actual actions for instance, including moving from set to set, changing costumes, etc., which in total all occurs such that every action follows from the previous one. The film is merely an incomplete sampling of this, just as the sequence 1211631 is a sampling of the deterministic production of all possible dice throws; its apparent randomness is a result of its incomplete context.
It’s not immediately clear to me that in Laplace’s original conception, the demon indeed must be outside the universe (it is of course an issue how he would take into account his own changing state in the process of the computation as part of the computation, but such recursiveness need not be vicious, I think – there could be some sort of ‘fixed point’ to converge to, which remains effectively constant after a certain number of iterations); and if he must be, while still having knowledge about the universe, I’d submit that you’re already talking about a sufficiently metaphysical creature that it is just as useless for deriving any epistemic insights as an omniscient god is.
Yes, because determinism shares the same basic assumptions with superstition and religious beliefs, that there is an entity or influencing factor outside the realm of the laws of the universe that determines the universe’s future. Which is false by definition.
How in the world do you get that from determinism? Determinism doesn’t have anything to do with something outside the universe influencing anything.
No it isn’t. For example, if some other universe intersected with ours and destroyed it, the universe’s future would have been pretty firmly determined from something coming from outside of it.
The influencing factor that determines the future of objects in our universe has to be outside the existential boundaries of the universe, by definition, because otherwise if the influencing factor was within the universe then it would obey universal laws and therefore it would be a property of the universe and not a pre-determined set of pathways from past to future.
Analogies always fail, and this one fails in excluding that “other universe” from what we can comprehend as existence. That “other universe”, if it exists, is part of a greater universe that includes us, therefore the term “universe” can be expanded so it includes any outside entities like our own system of galaxies, stars, etc.
Determinism claims that an object’s future is determined by some other entity outside the physical or existential parameters of that object.
It’s a false claim in more ways that one, but the way I tried to explain above I think is sufficient.
You do know the difference between “looks like” and “is”, right?
Brownian motion isn’t generally modelled by particle interactions, anyway. It’s generally modelled by random walks. That should tell you all you need to know about the stochasticity right there.
Presenting the "consensus’ is making an argument. The argument is a fallacy, but it is an argument, nonetheless.
The general “consensus” is that motion in gases has a random nature. It’s built into the assumptions of kinetic theory that are central to any modelling of particle interactions like Brownian motion.
How you can read a physics textbook and not see all the caveats about “ideal gas” and “approximation” and “abstraction” attached to the claasic mechanics model is beyond me.
Except classical particles don’t exist. They’re abstractions, theoretical constructs, not* in any way* real.
What, you want a cite for the existence of friction, elasticity, electrostatic and van der Waal’s forces? Or the fact that they’re not accounted for in the Newtonian model, which assumes inelastic point particles? Or even by Euler’s modification, which still assumes rigid bodies.
And of course they apply in Brownian motion, they apply to any microscopic/macroscopic particle interaction - that’s partly why there’s a noise term in the basic Langevin equation - you know, the one that describes Brownian motion?
Look, it’s all very well to go on about classical particles, but everyone (the same “everyone” that is behind your “consensus”, no doubt) acknowledges that they are abstractions. The map is not the territory.
The same equations of motion everyone agrees are just approximations? And that have no bearing on relativistic scales, anyway?
No. I’m saying they’re unknowable.
I don’t. There’s no “fact of the matter” until I actually know. What happened in the Sun five minutes ago is essentially in a different Universe from me. I only occupy a Universe that has what happened in the Sun 8 minutes ago, and back in the past from that.
Yes, but the fact that I can generate behaviour that is indistinguishable from Brownian motion without randomness means that I don’t need randomness to explain Brownian motion, thus assuming it is in violation of parsimony.
No, it merely tells me something about the modelling. I think every physicist will acknowledge that the stochasticity of the models for Brownian motion, ideal gases etc. is merely a parametrization of our ignorance.
No, the assumption is that the motion of atoms in a gas is well approximated by a certain probability distribution, which we substitute in place of the actual motion of individual particles. It’s exactly the same thing as describing the outcome of a great many of experiments statistically: you infer from there that the individual experiment itself is stochastic; that’s not a valid (nor true) inference.
Except that all these abstractions and approximations are exactly what allows us to use simple probabilistic models instead of descriptions of the full dynamics – that’s why these approximations break down in the limit of few particles.
No, but a cite for their stochasticity – all of those are explained by classical electromagnetism, which is a deterministic theory.
Newton’s theory is perfectly well capable of describing the full spectrum from completely inelastic to completely elastic scattering.
And yet, that very article talks about ‘apparently random movement’.
‘Classical’ meaning here merely ‘non-quantum’. Look, you’re just not going to get around the fact that classical physics is completely deterministic, no matter how hard you try.
The relativistic equations of motion that are exactly valid in special relativity.
Knowledge doesn’t have anything to do with the discussion.
Which is of course shown to be false by the EPR experiment, and moreso by FTL communication.