If predestination or predetermination or whatever you might call it exists, what controls it? and if something controls it, then why would that something want us to talk about it?
what i mean is this:
if you controlled EVERYTHING in the universe would you make the people talk about you all the time, or at all?
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or say something like this?
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Thanks for all of the helpful responses. I’m still as uncertain as I was before, but I feel like I have better reasons to be confused now.
By the way, I fully expected some people to try and post “random” things (nonsense phrases, numbers, strange arrangments of characters) in response to this thread, so they’re not as unpredictable as they might have thought…
hyjyljyj wrote:
“Thus for the survival and perpetuation of our species, it behooves us to behave as if there is free will, since there is no proven way to ascertain beyond all doubt whether there is or not.”
What about cases of chemical imbalance in the courts? Criminal action as a result of things beyond the control of the individual? We decide that someone was not in control of their actions because something else was determining them. It could be argued that ALL choices are the result of chemical interactions that are the product of genetics, nutrition, and environmental stimuli. As a result, drug companies develop chemicals to help maintain “normal” operation. As a result, we develop techniques for raising children such as exposing them to certain stimuli in hopes that it will help brain development. We can not live as if free will doesn’t exist, I agree, but we take steps everyday that confirm our understanding that other factors are determining our decisions. It’s an important truth.
We humans obviously seem to have special capabilities, as far as “beings” go in this world (I hope I do not have to debate this?). I would venture to say that humans are the only source that could generate a random occurrence, in spite of computers and math.
For instance, the sheet will fall the same way every time, if the air molecules are the same temperature and position, ect. This is a matter of physics, and physics is the god of this existence, it never fails and everything adheres to it’s laws always.
As far as conditioning, ask a kid whether he wants ice cream or brussel sprouts and you can predict with accuracy what he will choose… * but only if it matters to him*.
A human being, if it were possible to go back in time, could (maybe not would, but could) choose a different path of choices.
Consider that you were given a sheet of paper with 20,000 5 digit numbers on it and told to pick one and that it didn’t matter which one. The key words there are “didn’t matter which one”. Computers don’t understand that and there is no number for that. But a human being can sit there and immediately point to a number on that sheet. Those electrical impulses from brain to finger, if anything, are random. I believe it would be impossible for a human being to be conditioned in such a way as to pick that same number any number of times you presented him/her with the sheet in that same situation. the number means nothing to the human and the outcome is inconsequential. maybe since the human is right-handed he would pick a number on the right side of the sheet, or the human’s favorite number is 9 so she would pick a number starting with 9, but it’s still random, because he can understand “it doesn’t matter”. Granted these type of situations don’t occur very often in daily life, but it’s still important. Randomness is what makes us humans!
This is all conjecture, so take it for what it’s worth!
Are we humans intelligent/knowledgeable/experienced enough to make this statement?
FWIW, Wolfram, the “New Kind of Science” guy, thinks that the universe is entirely deterministic. However, it isn’t predictable because its behavior is so complicated that the fastest way to see what will happen is wait and see what will happen. The “randomness” that we observe is really just an artifact of this complexity, even on the quantum level.
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Wolfram is either an obsessed lunatic or Aristotle.
First, yes, you do have to debate that. I would contend that we are chemical mechanisms influenced solely by genetics, nutrition and environmental stimuli. Your brain is a chemical machine, that, in terms of function, is as free as your heart is to beat or your bicept is to lift. Our whole body is limited by what made it, and your brain is no different. While you appear to have freewill, you can only choose the course AT THAT INSTANT that your brain allows, based on all stimuli, genetics and diet up to that instant. Genetics, diet and stimuli do more than influence: they determine your decision. Your brain is EXACTLY and SOLELY a product of these three things.
Let’s look at computers. Not even computer random number generators are random. Rather, they are unpredictable because the number is generated based on a large number of varying factors. However the number is not truly random. The computer spits out the number based on X factors at the time. Those X factors are unlikely to repeat any time soon, and certainly not around the time at which the initial number is returned, and so the numbers appear random. The computer can not pull them out of thin air, but must have some varying criteria upon which it determines the number. This varying criteria, therefore, determines the number.
The same is true with your brain. If I ask myself to say a word, and I choose to say “red”, that word is what came to mind not because of free will, but because of some type of association or circumstance. There is a reason I didn’t say “blue”. Now just because I can go back in time and change that word to blue does not mean I have free will, because the “me” that goes back in time now has my own determinates that will decide what I say.
Ultimately, you’re brain is a machine made of meat. It has certain conditions within it that are determined by diet, environment, and genes, and those conditions dictate what decision it can make in a given instant. For instance, a car that is in drive with it’s wheels turned left can not go backwards and right in that instant. It can only go forward and left. The brain is no different. It has a way in which it works that is physical and limited, and while I appear to have complete freedom, I can actually only make choices based on the current state, and that current state is determined by all of the cumulative factors up to that instant.
Fuel: The problem with your proposition is you ignore time factors and the implications that may (or may not) imply.
Suppose you do this experiment and the human picks X random number. Now let us say we run time in reverse (note: that’s not the same as going back in time). Would he pick X again? Hmmmm…
You didn’t see that I said, “if it were possible to go back in time” (4th paragraph). So i did not ignore time.
Sourkraut, so you are saying that me writing this number down 3728540099900, is not random? I was conditioned my whole life up to this point by my experiences, psychological and physical, in order to generate that number at that specific time? Ok, fair enough, but geez, after generating say a 200 digit number, you would think that theory would become ridiculous? What do you think?
On the whole, our decisions are conditioned… say 95% of them. But humans, I believe, can possibly make random decisions, especially when they are ABSTRACT decisions, such as numbers.
No one here wants to debate human existence, but why are we so much more advanced than any other being on the planet? Surely it could be because of evolution, but it is also a reasonable proposition to just admit the obvious… WE ARE DIFFERENT! I know what you “contend”, and I don’t blame you. You have plenty of evidence for that. But I have plenty of evidence for the other side. I do not take sides on this issue, for lack of evidence on either side, but each side has their arguments. There is no debating the fact that we are different than any other being known, it’s just to what degree of difference that is debatable. Remember, scientists quote that we only use a small percentage of our brains. Maybe, just maybe, we haven’t figured out that the other '“unused” parts are for generating random numbers!
Again, not up for debate, just making a point. I guess you could call me open-minded to the reasonable possibility that humans are special?
Your analogy between computers and the human brain breaks down because of one simple fact: human brains are self-aware, and computers are not.
Computers can make decisions, i.e. given a set of inputs and a set of conditionals, a computer can compute the result. The same inputs and the same conditionals will always produce the same result, because the computer isn’t thinking, it’s just following a programmed path.
People can make choices, i.e. given a set of inputs and a set of conditionals, a person has the ability to chose which path to follow in arriving at the result. The path is not “programmed”, so the result is a matter of choice. That’s free will.
And by the way, on the subject of computer-generated random numbers: They are in no way unpredictable. If you know the algorithm and the inputs, you can “predict” exactly the numbers that the computer will generate; indeed, what do you think the computer itself is doing? We call them “random” because they typically don’t repeat in any obvious way, and that is typically achieved by using the current time in some for as one of the inputs.
Sorry, you did mention time. It doesn’t really matter though - my point is that if time were reversed, you would make the same “random” choice again.
Sorry to break this to you, but that is a hardcore myth, proven wrong on numerous occasions.
“Cites” you ask? “Plenty” I respond.
http://www.csicop.org/si/9903/ten-percent-myth.html
http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/tenper.html
Mycroft H.'s post is similar to George Gamow’s presentation in 1,2,3…Infinity, where he addressed “The Problem of the Printed Line”. He assumed a line length of 65 characters, and 50 possible characters - 26 letters, 10 digits, 14 punctuation. He imagined a simple machine to print out all combinations of these, i.e., all possible 65-character lines.
Nope. People can’t create even remotely random numbers. What’s more, people can’t (at least not by instinct - in fact, not without knowledge of the subject) create strings of digits that LOOK random. A common exercise for statistics students: flip a coin 200 times and record the results - in order to get a grasp of what random sequences look like. Well, some of the students cheat. And the professor can tell, because there’s 98% odds that a sequence of 6 in a row will appear in a student’s homework. The cheaters never manage it.
Besides, your random number doesn’t appear to be random. A random string of digits should have approximately equal numbers of each digit. Over large enough amounts of time, each (much smaller) sequence of digits should appear with approximately the same likelihood. In your thirteen digit number, we have 4 zeroes - roughly a third of the digits. Two strings, in fact, of two zeroes. Heck, it’s even divisible by a hundred. What are the odds that a randomly-chosen sequence is divisible by a hundred? 1/100, of course. I think most people would agree that our tendency to favor round numbers is more likely the cause of this.
People really don’t know what randomness looks like, what it is - probabilities seem like a simple topic but it seems our inherent wiring for evaluating them is just not very robust. Not like, for example, our pattern recognition skills, which clearly beat out anything computers will manage for quite a few more years.
In what sense? Broccoli is different from every other lifeform on earth. That doesn’t mean it understands random numbers. Or that it has free will, or a soul, or anything else. It’s just different. Different things are not the same. That’s all you can really say about them.
What argument? What point are you trying to make, anyway? People are people. So what? Not to say that people aren’t different, and unique, among animals. In fact, we seem to be the smartest critters on earth. That does make us special. But what of it? You seem to be trying to express the idea that humans have some qualitative difference from all other animals, but you haven’t even suggested what difference that might be. Once again, broccoli is different from everything else, but that doesn’t make it special. So you’re gonna have to be more specific here.
Once again, broccoli is different from everything else. As are giant pandas, earthworms, death cap mushrooms, bullfrogs, and anemones. There’s nothing exactly like an anemone. So the hell what?
And no, not only is the belief that we have huge amounts of brain capacity a ridiculous urban legend (as has been pointed out above), why in the world would we have it, and use it to create random numbers? How useful is the ability for a human to create random numbers? And why doesn’t this equipment work? I mean, when we need to make a choice between what one person does and what another person does, we can’t count on our ability to make random numbers. We have to use hacks like “odds and evens” or coin tosses. And when we try to fake our statistics homework or come up with random thirteen digit numbers to make some stupid point on an internet message board, we fail miserably. So when, exactly, do we employ the brain tissue that consumes approximately 20% of our food intake? Do you think humans evolved something nine times the size of their main cognitive organ in order to create random numbers - and yet we never, ever use it?
Not to mention that, if you ask a person to name digits randomly, I suspect even at the level of individual digits there will be significant patterns - probably differing from person to person, but there will be more 7s or less, more 0s or less, in the sequence, than would be predicted by chance. And of course, if you ask someone to think of a number between one and ten (ask someone!), well, chances are it’ll be seven. Why? Because people are terrible at making random choices, so we tend to go with our habitual answer here. This is something that I believe is documented (the tendency of Americans, at least, to pick “seven” when asked to name a random digit) but I can’t recall where I read it. Sorry.
Now, imagine your thought processes applied to anatomy. “90% of your liver isn’t used. Did you know that? Uh-huh, and we have it to filter out nuclear waste.” “Why would we evolve the capacity to filter nuclear waste from our bodies? We didn’t have nuclear power until recently.” “Humans are DIFFERENT. We are not the same as everyone else! I don’t want to debate it!” “But we can’t filter nuclear waste from our bodies . . . .”
We can’t generate random numbers, either. If you ask people to do it, patterns ALWAYS show up in the sequenc. Certain digits or subsequences are favored or disfavored, and it’s entirely accidental. Why? Because we really have zero capacity to choose random numbers. It’s quite clear, mathematically. Randomness isn’t some philosophical metaphor for free will - it’s a state that can be more or less artfully faked with computers, produced with specialized equipment, and described according to very well-established mathematical laws.
You can hold whatever beliefs you like about free will, but when you get to the scientific or mathematical arenas, not every view is equally valid, and if you want to make these statements here, either use the MPSIMS forum which, between its more interesting posts, tends to feature meaningess babble, or head to a place where people don’t know these things.
Oh, and to you others - one more thing. Pi is most assuredly NOT random. There is NOTHING random about pi - it’s a single, very specific number. Its digits are not random, they’re the ratio of a circle’s diameter to its circumference. The property you’re describing is actually normality, which means that, for an irrational number, its decimal expansion contains each possible sequence of digits in equal likelihood. Note that this is not proven (and it, of course, couldn’t be empirically shown, since that would require knowing and comparing an infinite number of digits) - it’s pure speculation, with perhaps some motion towards a proof. However, all we can really say is “it looks normal” - it seems to obey the standards of normality for the few million (or billion) digits we care to look at.
It is most assuredly not random. On preview, it seems like Excalibre did a good job of summing things up. I’ll just add two anecdotes.
An acquaintance wrote a Markov-chain analyzer for a roshambo (rock-paper-scissors) game. It started out great for me, beating it handily. After playing one hundred or so games with me , it would almost never lose. I would try to pick things randomly, but it was still very, very good at picking the right choice.
I play in bridge tournaments, and many people look at the computer-generated hands and think that the hands are tweaked to leave the “interesting” boards, but they’re completely wrong – no boards are removed, it’s just that people are bad at even recognizing randomness.
Now, as far as real randomness goes, quantum mechanics, as currently understood, says that at very small scales, the entire universe is random. Some people say that it’s not really random; that there are “hidden variables”, data that exists but that we don’t know the value of, and that everything is deterministic. However, experiments (including this one) based upon Bell’s Theorem seems to show that the hidden variables do not actually exist.