I've been thinking a little about Determinism and Free will

Great Debates
1

Well, like the title thread I should be doing some school work now but I decided to follow some random link in Wikipedia from paradoxes to time-travel-to more paradoxes to free-will… Bleh… Some sites can actually ruin a lot of time! There is just way too much info on wikipedia!

Okay well. I was going through the idea that one leading proponent of determinism had that basically stated that the future is the result of the sum of all past events. It seems logical enough. If our universe was a big bowl with marbles rolling around in it, I am sure that all of the events of the past could allow someone to predict what would happen in any point in the future. Well what if you made it more complex and instead of a bowl with two marbles rolling around it were 10. Sure, you would probably need to have a lot more info, but if your information in the beginning were perfect about the laws of nature and the positions of all of the balls at the start, then you could possibly predict what happens to all of these balls.

Obviously there is no human capable of predicting these things, but if there was an omnicient being who has witnessed the universe from the beginning, then he would have perfect knowledge of everything in the universe and would therefore be able to predict everything. I’ll use myself as an example.

I decided to go to Germany about 2 and a half years ago. To me this was totally random, and was caused by my meeting of Germans when I was studying in Spain. This is a complete chance encounter, and even I didn’t know if I wanted to go. That would seem like free will, right?

Then I think of it from the position of the omnicent being. He knows everythign about my body, where the atoms are, and understands exactly how my genetic makeup will function. As a human being, I make deciscions every day about various things, all of them are based on what I believe would produce the most favorable outcome. But this being, knowing everything, would have an entire map of my brain, and would know that I would ALWAYS predict the most favorable outcome. Of course there are people that do things that do things against what they percieve as the best outcome, but there is always a reason for it, namely stress, insanity, and other factors that can be predicted if one knows everythign else that is going to happen. If we would be able to compute the balls rolling around in the bowl knowing what we know about clasical mechanics, couldn’t the omniscient being knowing everything about every single rule in the universe, and every single unit be able to predict these complex systems predict what would happen. Of course classical mechanics is an incomplete description of what happens to the balls rolling around in the bowl, but lets assume that it is and that there is no friction whatsoever, so that all energy is conserved and it continues on forever.

Basically I only see the idea of randomness coming in the way of the omniscient being knowing exactly what will happen. But would it be possible for something to be random to an omniscient being? Randomness is something that can’t be predicted. But maybe there is something that explains randomness predictably. Then it would cease to be random, but most likely we wouldn’t really be able to do it. So basically free will depends on randomness. If randomness truely exists, then we have no way of having free will ourside of parallel universes and such. But to me that poses a whole new set of problems.

Obviously I havne’t studied this much as others, but that’s why I’m posing this here :wink:

I generally belive that the Universe is completely knowable. Just think about what we felt about Chaos theory, and other things? Human knowledge has progressed from understanding ever-more complicated ideas from previous ignorance. Consider the ideas of not understanding molecules, and atoms. Humans have previously lived in a world where disease was predicted by magic, and celestial bodies were explained by religion. Who is to say that there is a limit to understanding? I don’t believe it. So this makes me believe that the Universe is indeed totally understandable and the laws that govern it are also completely knowable. Obviously this isn’t possible to a human, but if such a perfect being existed, then he would know what we would do. Therefore if it is knowable what we will do, then free will is only an illusion.

There is obviously a few questions I have though… What if two things, whose outcome was dependant on the other had to occur at the same time? On the one hand I think of the balls. Obviously they contact each other at the same time, and the outcome is knowable by knowing the previous states and the motion, mass, etc of the the balls involved. This makes me think that this argument isn’t really valid.

This idea of determinism doesn’t seem to have any problems with time travel, because any actions of a time traveler would simply be viewable from the past, and any alterations on the past would be manifest in the future. Of course the omniscient being could see all of this anyway. The whole problem with time travel paradoxes to me would be that anyone acting on their own free will would just be able to alter the world as they chose, but if there is no free will, then they will just be doing what they are supposed to.

If free will doesn’t exist, why do we really believe that it does? One theory that has been offered is that it was an evolutionary advantage to humans. That is to say that of the humans that were propogated due to the already determined outcome were more likely to have the makeup to “choose” better outcomes for survival. Of course they didn’t choose, but their circumstances allowed them to procreate more because of their mutation which would also be knowable to the omniscient being. So this all seems to jibe to me.

But another way to look at it would be, what exactly is free will? Did it even really exist before the enlightment? Most surfs proably didn’t have the same sense of free will as we do. Sure they could believe that they had control over where they may sleep, or whatnot, but they knew that they could never be king, and they had no way of believing that they could be king. Many things were explained by the fact that it was God’s will, which would be unified since it would be composed by a single beign. Talk today to somene and tell them that, under no circumstances can he become president of the United States. My own sense of free will tells me that it is highly unlikely, but on the ohter hand there is the part of me that says, if I devoted every single effort I had to this talk that it is possible.

But then what about fatalism? If I come to realize that I have no control over free will, then I would say that it doesn’t matter what I do about it? On the other hand, I’ll never really know, will I? I can only predict that I will act in a manner that is predictable to some omniscient being. Couldn’t I just let my life go on autopilot? Well, I suppose I could, but that would mean that the omniscient being would have been able to see my theory from the beginning and realize that this would influence my deciscions to those that would be less conducive to success.

So this is awfully confusing now. My deciscion will affect the rest of my life, but that deciscion is predictable by the past. If I decide to still take my life by the horns and do everything in my power to take control of my life, it will only be becasue it is the logical outcome of every factor that came up in the universe beforehand.

What about religion?

What do you guys think about all of this?

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Your ideas would have been right on 100 years ago. However, we now have quantum mechanics to deal with. Some of the fundamental theories of quantum mechanics state that the most basic processes underlying the existence of the universe or, in fact, completely random.

From this site:

Now, the debate over free will versus determinism took a new turn about 70 years ago with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the introduction of quantum mechanics. The Uncertainty Principle established that the basic behavior of the universe was fundamentally random. That is, the most basic processes that underlie the functioning of the universe are unpredictable. This blows determinism right out of the water. If you can’t even be sure where an electron is or where it’s going, then you certainly can’t be sure what a complex system like a human being will do. Predestination just went down the tubes.

Here is a more academic article:

http://www.egodeath.com/QMHiddenVariablesDeterminism.htm

Search google for “quantum mechanics and determanism” if you want. There are lots of articles available.

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Yeah, I went crazy on that site the other day and read for about 7 hours.

I disagree. Time-space exists as one solid whole. The reason that we perceive the future as not existing “yet” is simply that our brain/minds are modified as time passes

Quantum mechanics makes the implication incorrect that we can predict the end state of any system, because many of the changes within are literally random. Further, the uncertainty principle also puts the kibosh on such complete modeling.

You’re simply defining the omnicient being as being able to do so, which begs the question of whether it is philosophically possible to know 100% any system. I would say that it’s impossible per Godel’s theorum, which proved conclusively that no mathematical system can be both complete and consistent. Even an omnicient being would be incapable of holding a complete system in its head, as it were.

Well, what is “free will”?

The being’s knowlege wouldn’t affect your freedom. Even I, who know nothing about you, know that your fate is one of having to eat and sleep every day for the rest of your life. Does my knowledge of that fact affect how free you are? No.

In theory, yes. Whether the being knew the exact order of future heads and tails of a coin or not, the sequence would still be random according to statistical standards.

Non sequitur. If you just started saying random things and performing random muscle twitches but felt you had no control over these, would you say that you were exercising “free will”? If not, then how does the randomness of any of your actions make you freer?

But the randomness you cherish is 100% guaranteed. There are quantum events whose outcomes are defined completely in terms of probabilities, and the outcome of, say, one nuclear decay (more knowledgable people, help me out) is known to be unknowable. Not just, If we had more knowledge, we could predict it. No! Even with infinite knowledge, we couldn’t.

OK, let’s cut to the chase with your free will question

I have a thought experiment that blows the whole problem to smithereens:

In Universe A, there is free will. In Universe A there are planets, people, etc.

Universe B is exactly the same as Universe A, except that it has no free will.

Describe in concrete terms the difference between life in Universe A and Universe B.

As a little thought will show, there is no difference in life between the two universes. Therefore the question of “free will” is moot, a complete red herring.

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I’d also like to point out that, AFAIK, the question of “free will” arose in the West because of the Church’s defining “God” as omnipotent, omnicient, etc. Now this could be taken to mean that God wills the actions of every person, but this notion didn’t jibe with the Church’s dogma. So the doctors of the Church (Aquinas, etc.) went out of their way to tell us that, hey, if we were going to Hell it was because we were bad and God’s not to blame for that.

In other words, the notion of “free will” was born of propaganda, rhetoric, and the Church’s desire to control the species.

The above is just my half-WAG interpretation. To get to the bottom of it, some real research would be necessary, including investigation of when the term “free will” was coined, what words in Latin were used, etc.

Also, half of “free will” is “will.” Medieval science believed that the mind had an identifiable facultry called “the will.” Although this is not complete BS–we call tell the difference, for example, between seeing an ice cream cone and wanting to eat an ice cream cone and finally saying “yes” and chomping on it–it would be a big mistake to pretend we understand the mind/consciousness enough to indentify this one monolothic function called “the will.” We can’t. Frankly, we know fuck all about how the mind works. Until we do, the question of whether the will is free is 100% moot.

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Okay, I actually did read about Quantum Mechanics, but I suppose I was wanting to deal with the philosophical side of things. I actually thought about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Pinciple as well. As I understand it you can never know the mass and the movement of an atom (or was it electron?) I am not sure, but once you get down to such a small level you can’t determine one without affecting the other.

But if the omniscient being “knows” from the beginning without having to use the methods of measurements that we mortals must use, then he or she wouldn’t need to test these things, considering how he or she already knew.

I know about all of this stuff, but I suppose I am trying to get a more philosophical take on things, maybe. Maybe there is some explanation behind quantum mechanics that we humans cannot possibly comprehend, yet is governed by some sense of order.

It seems like if an ultimate truth exists, then the universe is deterministic.

I do of course realize that quantum mechanics does debunk this scientifically, but I am assuming that everything that is unknown is knowable… But we’ll never know, I suppose.

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That is the philisophical side of things.

It’s position and momentum.

Again, you’re defining the omnicient being as knowing. But this brings up a neat question of epistomology: how would this omnicient being prove that it knew? Perhaps show us some results otherwise unobtainable. But then how would we be able to tell the difference between the omnicience knowing the results and directly controlling the results? We couldn’t, and we’d have a situation directly parallel to the original uncertainty.

Read the link to the wikipedia article I pasted above. The position you don’t like is called the Copenhagen interpretation, which is now dominant. People have tried to get around it but have failed.

Reasoning?

It is mathematically impossible to know everything, but it does not follow that we cannot often prove that something is unknowable.

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Also, if you really want philosophy, tackle my thought experiment in blue. It’ll blow your mind.

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to Aeschines,

You defenitely know your stuff, man,

but to any future posters, I suppose I am not really trying to put up much of a point by point proof, but this was just what I thought about going from my thoughts etc. I really appreciate the thoughts, though. Hmm…
But is it really inconcievable to believe that randomness can’t be explained by some concept that we can’t understand? I really don’t know myself, and I suppose that’s why I am posting this here. I’ll have to check out Godel’s theorum. But is it certainly known that one nuclear decay is completely unknowable? This whole idea that randomness to me as being completely unknowable seems to be a little to easy. But as I say, I am completely open to more information. But how do you prove that something is unkowable anyway? It seems hard to me to prove a negative.

And I see the non-sequitur about the whole free-will idea. Basically who is to say that these events that occur in the future aren’t my won free will. Does it even necessarily mean that if it can be predicted that I won’t actually making the deciscion for myself? Who is this entity that I consider to be making deciscions anyway? I only do what is logical to me to meet my ends. In some sense whether or not there is free will, I am pretty much destined to do what I want to. Isn’t that in some sense predestination?

In the end I suppose the question would be even if we are following some sort of predefined path and are just a bunch of machines moving along them, is it really not free-will anyway? As sentient beings we supposedly react to a situation. The idea of free will means that we get to choose how we react in certain situations. But we always choose what we want anyway. If I choose now to smash my computer monitor to disprove the idea, it will just be because I wanted to do it anyway. I am always going to choose what I want in the same way that the marble is always going to react the way it is determined to by a much simpler system. If it is indeed defined by randomness, then it is just me reacting to a random set of events.

I suppose that in the end, it doesn’t matter. If the universe is determined, then I am always going to choose to do what I want to do, and I’ll get the best possible outcome for my personal makeup. If everything is random, then I’ll still choose what I want, and the outcome will be random. So basically since I can’t know either, it doesn’t really matter either way.

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okay, aeschines,

I am a little behind on your responses!!!

But you have already answered some questions while I was typing them…
:rolleyes:

But thanks for all of the info, I’ll check it out sometime, and ask more questions I suppose.

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oops, didn’t mean the rolleyes simlie…

I meant this one.
:slight_smile:

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I wish! I’m just trying to make the best case within the limits of my knowledge, and trying to make it clear what I don’t know. Thanks, though, for the props.

It’s impossible. Consider nuclear decay. You can measure half-life in the agregate but you cannot, absolutely cannot tell when a certain particle is about to decay. There are no observational criteria. It’s not as though cracks form in the atom, water begins to leak out, and finally it blows. Even if the above did happen, those very symptoms could be considered part of the decay process, and you’d still be left with a bunch of pre-symptomatic particles whose time of decay is unknowable. It is random, pure and simple. But, paradoxically, in the aggregate the half-life will always be right.

That’s the biggest mind-blower of all, although it’s not related directly to randomness. Godel proved that even the truths of mathematics are fundamentally unknowable in toto. That is, even an omnicient being could not contain in its mind a mathematical system that was both complete and did not contradict itself.

It’s a canard that you can’t prove a negative. You can. In fact, any truth can be stated as a negative, so if you can prove the truth you can prove the negative. Proving that we can’t know something is not necessarily difficult. In the case of nuclear decay, we end up proving that that which we know–the decay time of an individual nucleus–is actually moot: there is no such time. We were assuming it isn’t random when in fact it is. Hence, one of our assumptions was incorrrect.

In other cases, a mathematical proof is possible that we can’t know something. We can’t know all the truths of a given system, since they are infinite per Godel’s proof.

None of is completely free, no matter what your definition. We are stuck in these bodies for the long all. The sun is going to rise and set every 24 hours for the next several billion years, barring some catastrophe. Still, even within these limitations we have much freedom.

Here’s another puzzler for you: Have you ever considered that freedom not only consists in the power to make a choice, but in the power not to make a choice? Put crudely, much of what is painful in life is like this: You’ve got diarrhea and must find a toilet but are “free” to run in any direction to find one. Not only are we not controlled, we can’t even turn off consciousness and the power to make choices when we want to.

We’re not following a predetermined path precisely because there is no omnicient being who consciously made the universe as it is. No one willfully constructed the rules. And you have precisely as much control over your destiny as you have, which is always some but never total.

That’s correct. You do what you want to do. What more could “free will” be than that?

Except that a marble isn’t conscious and doesn’t make choices.

Again, where would the difference lie? You seem to be getting it: No difference is possible to begin with; hence, the worry is moot.

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Actually, I’m going to contradict myself. I said,

[color=blue]That’s the biggest mind-blower of all, although it’s not related directly to randomness. Godel proved that even the truths of mathematics are fundamentally unknowable in toto. That is, even an omnicient being could not contain in its mind a mathematical system that was both complete and did not contradict itself.
[/quote]

My belief is that the matematical system (with infinite truths) is equivalent to That Which Is, including the Universe that we inhabit. I’m a pantheist, identifying the Divine as the main, positive vector (sat-chit-ananda/being-consciousness-bliss) within this system. I don’t believe that the system as a whole is conscious, so it does not “know” itself, but in a sense the infinite truths are contained therein.

13

Actually, I’m going to contradict myself. I said,

That’s the biggest mind-blower of all, although it’s not related directly to randomness. Godel proved that even the truths of mathematics are fundamentally unknowable in toto. That is, even an omnicient being could not contain in its mind a mathematical system that was both complete and did not contradict itself.

My belief is that the matematical system (with infinite truths) is equivalent to That Which Is, including the Universe that we inhabit. I’m a pantheist, identifying the Divine as the main, positive vector (sat-chit-ananda/being-consciousness-bliss) within this system. I don’t believe that the system as a whole is conscious, so it does not “know” itself, but in a sense the infinite truths are contained therein.

PS–It was determined by internal forces that I screw up the coding once again. :o

14

Aeschines has formulated the matter well.

Like I asked in this thread, if our brains output a decision based on “non-random” inputs (memories/sensory input/feedback) and random inputs (from quantum uncertainty), where is the will?

We will likely never be able to predict the decision a brain will output, just as we will never predict the weather a year in advance. But that does not mean that we cannot explain the mechanism of outputting a decision, just as we can explain the weather.

It can be deterministic even if it is not determinable.

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I thank you humbly.

Yeah. The medievals formulated the faculty of the will without really knowing how the mind and consciousness work. It is folk psychology/neurology, nothing more. Maybe we’ll figure out what’s really up in the next several hundred years.

Quibble: The output is on the level of the person because of the huge role played by the endocrine system.

But beware the false satisfaction that comes from pointing out the controversial obvious (the “Dennett Syndrome” :slight_smile: ).

Actually, I think the Universe as we understand it through QM is determinable (to some degree) without being deterministic. Also, it’s quite possible for a system to be deterministic on one level without being deterministic on another: half of a radioactive sample will be gone when the half-life is up, although we cannot say which atoms will decay.

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This notion keeps on coming up so frequently that I’m thinking of saving a stock reply in notepad and then copy-paste it to save time.

Quantum mechanics does not show that the world is fundamentally random. Human scientists who study phenomena at the quantum scale, can’t predict certain behaviour.

This means one of 3 things :-

[ul]
[li]The world is fundamentally random.[/li][li]World is deterministic, but we only currently can’t predict it. The Heisenberg Principle disallows this interpretation by stating in formal terms that uncertainty is necessary. That assumes that the epistemological confidence in current conceptions of mathematics/logic remain successfully unchallenged.[/li][li]World is deterministic, but since we are participants within the universe, fundamentally, we can’t be omniscient. Possibly a detached outside observer of the universe, if even such a concept can be accomodated philosophically, might have omniscience.[/li][/ul]

Coming to the topic at hand, my current stance(which has changed), is that determinism does not rule out true free will. Reason being, that at some level, all existence/essence is necessarily free (since it is all there is) Whether that translates to free will for humans depends on your beliefs about consciousness and the nature of the universe.

Since I believe that consciousness is primary, I can reconcile determinism with free will by framing change fancifully as follows: there are ‘n’ variables of change. The primary of the variables is the ‘will’. The universe you inhabit is dependent on the whole n-tuple {will,a,b,c,d} with ‘will’ not open to empirical observation. Of all the possible parallel universes you can diverge into, the ‘will’ determines where you go. The variables a,b,c,d are empirically available and appear smooth and ordered, in order words, deterministic, since they simply demonstrate their interdependence on the ‘will’ and to each other. Of course, this contraption won’t hold water if you believe that the phenomenon of consciousness itself is a byproduct of the dynamics of certain arrangements of matter.

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Is that not merely a rehashing of the now rather discredited Hidden Variable theory, Gyan?

Determinism relates to causes “external to the will” by definition.

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Bohm showed that hidden variable theories aren’t ruled out. Your linked article itself says that, alongwith the fact that nonlocal hidden-variable theories are still in the running. If you have information on developments that conclusively rule out (as opposed to suggestion) any hidden-variable theory, feel free to share it.

Seems more like a redefinition. You are a physicalist -> we are completely physical. Determinism is about order in physical systems. Our ‘will’ is thus subject to physics. Hence the consideration of determinism applies.

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[sub]pssst… Aeschines… it’s omniscient.[/sub]

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this is always my question when free will comes up for discussion. by what mechanism does the “will” act, and how can it be said to be free? most people who “believe in free will” have no idea what exactly it is they’re referring to.

that said, without delving into the sub-topic of determinism, i’ll give my take on “free will”. to me, the “will” is the mechanism by which we make a choice, or perhaps the sum total of all the mechanisms by which we make all choices. at any rate, if we accept that given a set of options for a theoretical decision, we can make a “choice”, we can call that free will. i guess what i mean is, just because the world is deterministic (assuming it is), doesn’t mean we don’t have choices. it just means we could only have made the one we did.