I think that’s a subtly different definition of “simulation.”
In the case of e.g. supernovas, we’ve got a ground truth out there in space that we’re attempting to recreate virtually.
In the case of, say, World of Warcraft, we have a simulated world that doesn’t have to have any correspondence with the real world. It succeeds or fails on its internal consistency, not its external fidelity. There’s no reason in principal that the WoW developers can’t be omniscient and omnipotent within their creation.
If we’re really living inside a simulation we have no way of knowing which type it is. We and lots of other worlds might be some kind of massively parallel sociology experiment. Where the whole point is to validate their models by watching what happens. Or we might just be an entertainment; Game of Thrones writ large. Complete with the occasional host-directed deus ex machina to achieve some vital plot point.
Against this flood of weird interpretations, the gods themselves contend in vain. Especially against the ones which can’t be distinguished from each other, even in principle.
(Well, someone else got to the apt SF author reference first!)
Anyway, the best tonic against the supercomputer/dragon dream/mind of God interpretation is, “So what?” If we can’t tickle the dragon’s tail from in here, if we can’t rig an experiment to distinguish between a real reality and Memorex, we have to act like we’re real, like everything is live, because that’s how it will always appear to us. So if we’re treating everything like it’s real, the question of whether we’re a simulation or a dream, or a simulation dreaming it’s dreaming, or a monk dreaming he’s a butterfly dreaming he’s a God, or so on, is something less than meaningful.
Exapno’s Proposition (as I now will refer to it) strikes me as profound. / not snark.
Suggestively Delphic. Raises questions either for theoretical physics (this good thread) and, for me, in how I understand mathematical philosophy (not much).
OP spinoff to come…
Yeah, that’s my point. It works just as well in the free will vs. determinism debate. We all act exactly as if we had free will and we treat the external world as real because we can do nothing else. The nutty case for the universe being a computer simulation is built upon a tower of “ifs” and has the intellectual foundation of quicksand in a blender.
Thank you, but what I said is basic math and has been previously said by every writer on the subject of QM. The nuance is in the interpretations, which uses the underlying math in different ways because that solves different puzzles more efficiently.
Math is full of such approaches, probably the most famous being algebra and geometry, which look very different but are identical descriptors underneath. (Every classical construction is the same as an algebraic equation. Not every algebraic number is constructible by straightedge and compass, though, which is how they proved you can’t square the circle or trisect an angle. Relieve those restrictions and it can be done.)
The QM interpretations do the same thing, much like using algebra to make sense of problems extremely difficult to visualize in geometry.
As an aside, although I agree that the absence of free will (it’s an incoherent concept, an illusion) has almost no consequences for how we live our lives, it does have one strong implication for criminal justice. It means that there is no rational or ethical justification in punishing people solely for retribution.
I’m unclear why you’re so dismissive. Do you think that simulating a universe is, in principle, implausible for an advanced simulation? Why “nutty”?
I’m afraid I don’t understand this. Specifically I can’t tell what you’re saying. I’m not debating your correctness because I can’t get that far.
Are you saying people do or do not have free will? Or perhaps you’re saying that it’s a meaningless (undecidable?) concept in the first place?
As to the “solely for retribution” part, are you saying that that’s ethically indefensible in the presence of, or the absence of, or the incoherence of, free will? Which is your assertion?
I just can’t parse your sentences stably enough to decide which you meant. Probably mostly my failing, but please humor me.
There is no such thing as free will in the sense of “could have done otherwise in precisely identical circumstances” (other than stochastic variation). It’s not an empirical question - it’s simply an incoherent concept. There is no observable that corresponds to it, all we have is a subjective illusion that’s generated internally when we make decisions.
That being so, punishment solely for retribution - i.e. soley to harm the perpetrator for it’s own sake - is logically indefensible. (This has nothing whatsoever to do with “making excuses” for people, or the entirely orthogonal question of the severity of punishment - just that the reason for punishment should only ever be deterrence or removal.)
If we lack free will and punishing for retribution is determined then it is rational and ethical by definition. (Unless nothing is, which is also possible given the premise.) Your ethics are individual and obviously not universally meaningful.
I like this critique of Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s argument in favor of the concept.
These arguments are similar to the ones that say that we shouldn’t let our electronic broadcasts radiate out from earth because it is inevitable that hostile aliens will use them to find us and eliminate us. Once you postulate a sufficient number of “ifs” and turn them into “musts” nothing is deniable or falsifiable. It’s certainly not science and I’d argue it’s not reason either.
But this is almost the appeal to consequences fallacy. You’re saying no free will means no ethics. Well, perhaps “right” and “wrong” must start to mean something slightly different from our prior conception when we realize that free will is nonsense, but that does not save free will. We must simply rethink matters. In fact, I see no reason that the absence of free will negates ethics. If I kill someone, although ultimately I could not have done otherwise, it was still wrong to do it. A criminal justice system can still be either just or unjust, even if ultimately that criminal justice system itself (the product of our communal decision-making) could not have been otherwise.
But, ultimately, I think you’re saying - if there’s no free will, why bother?
I think the best analogy is this: our visual system incorporates many illusions generated by our brain that allow us to interpret the world - we do not “really” see the continuous perfect picture that our brains tricks us into thinking we’re seeing. But, although it’s interesting to learn about this, it would be crazy to start trying to subsequently try to use our eyes differently for practical purposes. Obviously our visual system evolved that way because it works well.
Similarly, our brains developed the illusion of free will in decision-making. All that we are really doing is processing data and generating output, but perhaps the illusion of deliberation and agency leads to better decisions. Thus, as in the point you made earlier, even though free will is an incoherent idea and does not exist, it would be silly to try to actually fight the illusion of free will as we make decisions every day. I agree that the world seems strange and uncomfortable in certain ways without free will, but ultimately we just shrug our shoulders and get on with making decisions as best we can, including arguing for an ethical justice system.
@Reimann: Thanks for indulging me. Very clear now between your last two posts. I’m not sure I agree yet, but it smells pretty good. I’ll need to do some more reading.
I don’t think I’m saying that. But maybe that is an illusion…
I’m not even sure that the opposite of free will is determinism, because that is not a definable single thing. It matters greatly whether our actions are determined by an actor, how much control is exerted, whether randomness can interfere with control, if other competing actors exist, and the level of omniscience and omnipotence achieved, since we have no idea of what those terms light mean in practice.
In simplest terms, if every action is controlled by a higher-order power, then all matters of right and wrong devolve to that power. It is meaningless to speak of our culpability. Your argument parallels those of many religions, in which their god determines every action but people still must not do wrong. That is inherently contradictory.
Right and wrong are subsumed under free will. Remove that and you necessarily remove morality. Which is why nobody actually acts as if the world is determined and why people who say that the voices in their head commanding them to take actions are deemed insane. Otherwise it’s a “get out of moral consequence free” card, which is the one thing in morality never acceptable.
It’s never “if there’s no free will, why bother?” More, “if there’s no free will, then I can’t help myself and you can’t judge me.” And for actual day-to-day living, “there must be free will.” I see no difference between “we live our lives exactly as if there is free will” and “we have free will.” Nobody has yet made a convincing argument to a distinction, including the simulation contrivers.
You are discussing whether an agent is “free” in the sense of “unconstrained”. What I’m talking about has absolutely nothing to do with that.
I assume almost nothing, but however our decisions are made, they must be made somewhere. We can even allow the existence of mind-body duality, of a soul, whatever - I assume nothing about what exists and where or how we make decisions, or about the physical mechanisms, but for shorthand let’s use “brain” to denote the decision-making part of us. I only ask that we must be careful not to make the mistake of a combination of petitio principii and the homunculus argument, assuming that there is some independent sub-entity within the brain with free will, because then it just reduces to asking how that sub-entity makes decisions.
So how are decisions produced? There may be random elements that may cause uncertainty and variation, but nobody thinks rolling a dice is free will. That leaves deterministic reasons. Really, logically, what else is there in any conceivable universe other than deterministic elements plus stochastic elements? So, if a decision is made for reasons, how can it possibly be that precisely the same data input into a brian in precisely the same prior state can ever produce a different output (setting aside random variation)? It just makes no logical sense.
Moreover, there is simply no observable event that has ever occurred in the history of the world that corresponds to the notion of somebody “doing something different in precisely the same circumstances”, because we only get to run history one time. We have an incredibly strong internal illusion that we could have done something different if we re-ran history, but we have no evidence whatsoever to back up that illusion.
Thus, as I say, what is usually called contracausal or “spooky” free will - the notion that we could have done otherwise in precisely the same situation - is simply an incoherent concept. The reason that it does not exist is not empirical. It could not possibly exist in any universe because at heart it’s nonsense.
The number of philosophers who believe in contracausal free will is to a good approximation zero. Yet, the vast majority of people still do believe in it, imo just because they haven’t thought it through carefully. Some philosophers (such as Dan Dennett) have written books supporting the notion of free will - but they have just re-defined it to mean something else, “lack of constraint” or whatever. Imo they distract from the important fact that what Christians and almost everyone else means by free will (the contracausal kind) is simply nonsense.
The many-worlds interpretation of QM explicitly defines realities as the same prior state producing differing outcomes. It’s hardly unthinkable.
As for the rest, I’m always leery of explanations that require eliminating all real-world definitions of words. The public discussion of free will vs. determinism is conspicuously lacking in philosophers.
Most people, when they use terms like “free will”, have no idea what they themselves mean by those terms. Pinning down an actual definition is the first step in resolving any question on the topic, and yet so few people ever even get that far.
Personally, I’d define an entity as having free will if that entity acts according to its own nature. I don’t think that this definition is particularly at odds with any popular (and ill-defined) conception of “free will”, and yet it is manifestly not at all in contrast to determinism.
I don’t see how something supernatural makes any difference at all. Suppose a supernatural entity exists, beyond the ken of current science & knowledge. The supernatural entity is the source of our decisions. How does it make those decisions? It’s still true that the process must either be random, or for reasons. What else is there? Where is the free will? It does not lie in either randomness or determinism. An incoherent concept is not rescued by just saying “supernatural”. Contracausal free will cannot exist in any conceivable universe, because it’s simply nonsense.
Can you think of a better definition? Besides which, there is already an established concept of the wind having free will:
Praise to the wind, that blows through the trees
From the sea’s mighty storm, to the gentlest breeze
They blow where they will, they blow where they please
To please the Lord