I am thinking of a literal block (in four dimensions) and imagining a block universe as entirely static.
Film is a great metaphor for a slice of two dimensional space over time, so naturally it lends itself to my concept of a block of three dimensional space over time. Let’s look at your criticism of the film metaphor from upthread,
I am of the opinion that a block universe falls into the latter category, it merely happens to look like cause and effect. Therefore a block universe is not a “real” universe, which is fine by me.
I would go further and say abstract objects exist independent of human thought. Therefore no deterministic universes are “real” in the same sense of the word, they all exist as static orthotopes. I would go even further and posit that for every “real” indeterministic universe that may exist, there exists an indistinguishable fully deterministic universe which is not real. The distinction between real and not-real therefore has no meaning to me.
And thus do I deflect your counterargument.
Impossible to imagine? I can imagine things that violate the known laws of physics, no problem. In the context of a block-universe, it could be some ad-hoc physical anomaly which causes the trees to suddenly fall.
I suspect you may counter: if there’s a physical anomaly the universe isn’t identical to our own. If so, I suggest you reexamine the language you used in the above quote, especially the word “except”. An exception to the identical nature of our own (presumably block-) universe and this hypothetical block-universe will necessitate a change in physics or structure, so by creating an exception, you have implied a difference in either physics or the structure.
Just once in one of these discussions, I’d like for one of the opponents of free will to clarify how they experience life. If free will has no explanatory power, do they have the subjective experience that their choices are fully determined by the history of the universe and laws of cause and effect? Do they experience that their choices are random?
Way back at the beginning of this thread, the OP suggested that “lack of Freewill doesn’t mean lack of choice”. I believe that this is precisely wrong. In order for it to make sense, it seems to me that there are two options. You can reinterpret the meaning of “choice” to include phenomena that follow inevitably from predecessor states; in which case, you have to admit that an apple “chooses” to fall when it’s unsupported against gravity. Or you can come up with some special pleading about brains as @Mijin does and how they are somehow the “proximate cause” of our choices/intentions. But this sense that there is something “special” about our brains that make them “essential” to choice and intent is exactly what is meant by free will. We have the experience of our choices standing outside the chain of causality, neither fully determined by what has gone before nor completely independent of it (ie random). We (or at least I) experience it as a third way: as self-caused. The explanation of how this could be gets into @Half_Man_Half_Wit 's infinite regress. That explanation may be unsatisfying, but even the most orderly deterministic universe includes the same paradox of first mover. It just has it in one spot where a universe with free will has it in many.
This is the exact opposite of special pleading. In a Deterministic universe we can still say that the friction of the teeth of a chainsaw is integral to a tree falling down; we don’t throw our hands up and say everything is just caused by everything. Or my parents having sex is more the cause of me existing than the rotation of the Andromeda galaxy.
Likewise my conscious thoughts are the cause of me drinking some pepsi right now. Yes, there are reasons I had those thoughts, but how could it be otherwise? The important point is that my thoughts are not epiphenomenal.
I’ll reply to all the other points when I have time, but I wanted to nip in the bud the idea that I am in any way making the brain exceptional. I am trying hard to push the case that we should not treat it as a special case.
That sounds like you’re either saying that decision making is epiphenominal or that there is something special about brains. And since this was also you: “My decision-making process is very far from epiphenomenal”, I’m taking that to mean you think there is something special about brains that allows them to originate decisions (choices, intentions, etc.).
If I’ve misunderstood, I apologize. But I’m afraid that given what you’ve said I couldn’t have done otherwise.
I think Mijin might be using the word epiphenomenal as in epiphenomenalism, which has the exact opposite meaning as its normal use.
“my thoughts are not epiphenomenal” can mean either
my thoughts are not: a secondary phenomenon that arises from a primary physical process such as lifting a Pepsi can (possibly what you think Mijin’s position is)
my thoughts are not: a secondary phenomenon unable to affect physical processes such as moving a Pepsi can with my hand (Mijin’s position, I think)
No, I am saying that decision-making is a physical process which happens in brains.
This is neither special pleading nor saying that decision-making is epiphenomenal. I honestly don’t know why you think it is.
It’s also demonstrably true. Bizarrely, in this thread many people wish to handwave the role of the brain. The brain is clearly the organ where decisions are made; we can even go down further to the specific structures within the frontal lobe where decisions happen.
And sure, whether those structures fire is ultimately a product of their neuronal structure and their inputs. And those inputs are ultimately a function of neuronal structure and data received from the sensory organs.
So in a Deterministic universe all of this is hypothetically calculable (although note that that calculation necessarily includes a perfect simulation of my brain which includes my consciousness).
But again, what’s the alternative? Forget about Determinism, and our universe for a moment, it’s a red herring to consider these as the problem with free will.
In a dream universe, where “free” choices are regularly made, how are they made? Remember it can’t simply be a function of sensory information and innate properties (and possibly randomness), since that’s the kind of function that I just described in the brain.
What is there in the dream universe that isn’t in ours?
Ok, now to get to the task of replying to the longer posts.
This seems to be alluding to the “could have chosen differently” definition, and no I don’t agree with that. I don’t agree with that definition of intention (as “could have chosen differently” is itself problematic) and in turn I don’t agree that intention has been ruled out in a deterministic universe.
Sure, and in a Deterministic universe, my conscious thoughts are entailed in that state, they are not separate to it.
Imagine someone with a pen and paper using your function to work out whether I’ll drink coffee or tea. At some point on that piece of paper will be written, whether explicitly or implicitly, “It’s getting a bit late for coffee, I’ll have a tea” if those were my conscious thoughts prior to choosing tea.
It’s a wholly incorrect framing to imagine my conscious thoughts as not being relevant to the choice.
Most of the models you list are something akin to Last Thursdayism.
Sure, we can’t rule them out, but our ability to do any kind of empirical reasoning at all relies on us assuming cause and effect. The fact that you are repeatedly trying to challenge the absolute fundamentals of how we can know anything at all shows how bankrupt the concept of “free will” is.
You know what, I’ll accept this as a third option.
However, this particular flavor of intention has no evidence for it and no explanatory power. You yourself have suggested merely an infinite chain of wills (which we also have no evidence for) as how it manifests.
Firstly this is a response to you claiming I had not stated why my problem with “free will” is: do you now take that back, as I stated that problem from my very first post and continually thereafter?
Secondly, the burden of proof isn’t on me. Anyone that wishes to claim “free will” does have explanatory power is free to do so.
I think it’s pretty sad you’re pretending not to see the difference between a model that can explain billions of events of over billions of years, and continues to be useful to all of us every day, and a model that can explain precisely nothing ever.
BTW, FTR, I would agree I ate a peanut butter because of my “will”, as long as we’re defining will as manifest in my neurology, part of my conscious thoughts, completely consistent with Determinism. “Free will” on the other hand, I’ll believe as soon as it is concretely defined and any evidence is presented.
Actually I forgot about that criticism. I meant the other one: that there is no universal sense of “now”.
I mean, we could define “now” as everything causally linked in a light cone. But that would make every slice in your film relative to some observer. Every single slice would also be fringed with the big bang.
I am not aware of whether there are other interpretations of “slice” in the block universe, but since different observers can disagree on the order of events (and neither perspective is more correct), I very much doubt that a film reel set of spatial slices through time is going to make any sense.
No, the latter category is that the block universe does have cause and effect.
You asked me what the difference is between a flipbook and slices through our universe. I told you: our universe has physical laws, and we know this because we can use those laws to predict future events. We can build everything from telephones to toilets based on our understanding of those laws.
It’s not a great deflection though.
We were not even talking about “real” and “not real”.
In a sense I would agree with you, in that my position is that “real” and “illusion” are just labels for interpretations of reality, not intrinsic properties of anything “out there”.
It’s not relevant to what we were talking about though.
I thought it was obvious from context, but to clarify: I mean imagine the universe as it is, complete with its known physical laws, except the chainsaw doesn’t exist.
It’s impossible because matter just disappearing and a tree just being sawn on its own isn’t consistent with known models.
Very obviously if we’re just throwing out our understanding (or allowing ad hoc new laws to be added) then the tree in the hypothetical could do anything you want. It could turn to custard and fly to the moon.
Not necessarily. It is entirely possible that calculating s_1 based on s_{1 \text{ billion years ago}} will produce a result where you decide to drink tea, without needing to write down your thoughts in any intermediate step.
Consider a simple linear relation s_t = s_{t-1} + 2. You seem to suppose that any function s_1 = f(s_{-999,999,999}) which satisfies the aforementioned relation will involve an intermediate calculation of s_0. We can pretend the state one billion years ago is s_{-999,999,999} = 1,000,000,000, the state where your hand goes for the tea is s_1 = 3,000,000,000, and s_0 = 2,999,999,998 represents the state where your intention to drink tea is physically manifested in your brain*. I define f such that f(x) = x + 2,000,000,000, I can determine that you will drink tea (s_1) without ever writing down your intention to do so (s_0).
* (You could say I’ve let a whole year pass between your intention to drink tea and your actual drinking of tea. I did this because it matches HMHW’s post which mentioned billions of years. We could easily change the unit of time from years to seconds, or we could use s_{0.999999998} or something.)
This statement is incomprehensible. If everything was physically close at a distant point in the past - which I thought was the mainstream theory of origination - you could pretend each object had a clock that was synchronized at that point, and use the calculated read of each clock as an absolute measure of time.
ETA: Alternately supposing everything was physically close at a distant point in the past, you could imagine a single clock at the gravitational center of the universe and use that as a universal measure of time.
To me the way this conversation has been going demonstrates quite well the problems with the whole concept of free will, that @Mijin was pointing out, if I’ve understood correctly. The thread has also been an example of what I see as a common problem in communication. Actually, those two things may be the one and the same – lack of agreement or common definitions leads to a situation where one side is arguing for A being correct while the other argues for B being incorrect.
To be clear, I’m not trying admonish anybody for misunderstanding intentionally (there’s that word again!), just pointing out what I see happening quite a lot in all kinds of situations. I think it would help to consider if this happening, whenever a conversation seems to be stuck at any particular point.
To give credit where it’s due, this is the thread that finally made me sign up, after years of ‘lurking’.
Here are my two cents, for what they’re worth (Is that a pun? Also, forgive me if any of this seems trivial, but I really feel it’s beneficial to drill down to the basic level and not presume everybody understands these things the same, at this point. I freely admit all of this may seems hugely pedestrian to all involved, but I think it would be useful to put these things to words and see what happens).
I see the core problem in the whole debate as somewhat definitional, as I said, in agreement to some. To me, it seems that the proponents of free will are sort of mixing up different levels or categories of definition. From my point of view it makes no sense to say that thoughts could be disconnected from the physical universe. They are the product of brains. So what the I understand the opposition of free will being is simply that, given an omniscient perspective, it would be trivial to predict all thoughts simply from observing physical phenomena. And thusly, a human will cannot be free from being influenced by it’s surroundings, essentially.
Free will proponents seem to interpret the opposition as saying that humans are simply some sort of automatons, with no real agency. And I guess this is exactly what the OP was attempting to address. That in the sense determinists define free will, it doesn’t exist, but in another sense it does. And this is the sense used in a legal context for example. And this is what I meant by the “category mistake” I referred to above. Humans have will – since that word is referring to particular aspect of human thought – but that will is as much a product of brain activity as anything else in the mind. When something goes wrong with the brain, it can lead to the person in question having a will to do all kinds of unproductive things, including terminating their life. (I was going to write ‘existance’, but for clarity opted for another word, since I could see myself arguing that a human being doesn’t seize to exist simply by dying. They just seize to be very stimulating company.)
No, it doesn’t. Whether one ‘could have chosen’ differently is a separate question; but in an indeterministic universe, there are undoubtedly branching points—that is, events where the future history of the universe isn’t fully predetermined (that’s kinda what’s meant by ‘indeterministic’). These events then determine which path is chosen, and thus, hold what I’ve called ‘significance’ for the universe’s future history—they genuinely determine it, and aren’t just ‘along for the ride’.
In a deterministic universe, however, no such branching points exist. Hence, nothing holds such significance, and since nothing does, in particular, your intention doesn’t. That was my contention when I said that in such a universe, your intention doesn’t originate anything, it doesn’t determine the future course of the universe, it’s just along for the ride. This seems entirely uncontroversial and obvious to me, but you disagreed with it, which is what produced this particular branch of the discussion.
Your conscious thoughts would be relevant if they influenced that choice, i.e. if, like the random event in an indeterministic universe, they could make it such that one rather than another option was chosen. But they can’t. They’re a part of the road that needs to be driven down, sure, but that doesn’t mean they determine that path. Think of driving north on a straight road: you need to cross km 99 to drive along km 100, but that doesn’t mean that km 99 did anything to determine the path you’re on—that you took a right turn instead of a left one earlier, however, does.
Events that realize one out of a set of options are relevant in an explanatory sense to the option that actually is realized; they determine that option. Events that don’t simply don’t add anything. That’s why, in a graph, you only need to specify the vertices, where multiple edges join; you don’t also need to specify every point along the edges—they’re wholly redundant. And in the same sense is your intention redundant in a deterministic universe.
Earlier on, you phrased causation in terms of an evolutionary metaphor. That’s a bad example, because evolution actually adds information, due to mutation and selection—the elimination of alternatives, realizing one option out of many possibilities. The sequence of cause and effect in a deterministic universe is more like the sequence of chickens laying eggs that grow again into chickens: each moment contains exactly the same information; hence, no moment adds anything of explanatory significance to the question of what happens at any given other moment. If you ask, where does that chicken come from, you’re not satisfied with being pointed to the egg; you want to know where the egg comes from—but that lands you with a chicken again. It’s even become idiomatic that no real answers are obtained in this way.
Your intention doesn’t explain anything about your actions because it’s equivalent to them, in a deterministic universe. It’s just a restatement of the same question. So answering, why did you have a peanut butter sandwich? with a reference to your intention in a deterministic universe fails to actually tell us anything—you could just as well answer with ‘because I had a peanut butter sandwich’. Both are exactly equivalent.
If there was a random event in the mix, though, then you could point to that, and genuinely derive some explanatory relevance—if you threw a coin, and its outcome was completely random, then the fact that it landed, say, heads is new information—it’s an act of creation in that sense. It’s not reducible to anything else (the way your intention is in a deterministic universe). So if, based on that coin throw, you chose peanut butter over cheeze whiz, then pointing to the coin throw as determining your choice actually tells us something non-trivial.
Do you see how these are different situations? In a deterministic universe, the information is constant, at every point in time, hence, earlier states don’t add anything—to point to an earlier state as the reason for a later one is just the same thing as pointing to that later state as its own reason. It’s mathematically trivial. That’s not the case if there are genuine options, genuine branches, only one of which is realized by a random event (or something equivalent). Then, new information is added into the mix, and one can point to that information as determining the course the universe took from that point on.
Sorry, but that’s simply wrong—as the examples show, you can have perfectly justified empirical reasoning without assuming cause and effect. We only need correlations to make predictions, and, as the old canard has it, correlation doesn’t imply causation.
My prediction that the sun will rise tomorrow does not depend on there being some causal factor at work that makes it rise; it simply depends on its rising being a regularity of the universe. Causal factors are one way to ensure regularity, but not close to the only one.
In fact, there are many laws in established science that work this way. In thermodynamics, we can use the terms ‘entropy’, ‘heat’, ‘enthalpy’ and so on as if they were causally efficacious; but they aren’t—they’re just statistical quantities. It’s not the heat differential between two bodies that causes heat to flow from the hotter to the colder body (as was assumed before the statistical foundations of thermodynamics were explicated by Boltzmann et al.), it’s simply that there are more ways for the system to evolve into a state where heat is more evenly distributed, and hence, such a distribution is more likely. Yet still, we can make perfectly valid empirical predictions on this basis.
There’s nothing that says that all physical laws couldn’t be of this sort. In fact, a growing body of work aims to derive Einstein’s equations, and thus, the laws of gravity, from thermodynamic principles. Then, an apple falling down wouldn’t be caused to do so by the Earth’s mass; it would simply be the case that there are more ways for both bodies to move closer together than there are for them to move apart, hence any random change is going to prefer the former over the latter. But still, all the predictions made using Newton’s law of gravitation would be just as valid as they are today.
Seriously—the fact that our empirical observations tell us nothing about causality is a very well established philosophical principle. As Hume observed, causation never plays a role in our empirical investigations—all we have is what he termed ‘constant conjunction’. That’s all we have any empirical grounds to assert; everything else is speculative metaphysics.
So no, I’m not ‘trying to challenge the absolute fundamentals of how we can know anything’. Our knowledge, in as much as it is empirical, derives from ‘constant conjunctions’—from stable regularities, patterns in the way things happen. But these aren’t just present in universes where one moment causes the next.
Think of a patterned rug: having seen half of it, you can probably predict how the pattern will continue. And if the pattern holds, then your prediction would hold, likewise. But that doesn’t mean that the pattern of the rug up to that point determines or causes the pattern of the rest, nor that there is a law that forces the pattern to be a certain way. It’s the other way around: because there is a pattern to the rug, can we formulate a law—which is nothing but a compressed description of the pattern—that ‘governs’ it. This is a very popular view of natural laws, due to David Lewis (sometimes called ‘Lewisian Humeanism’)—they describe the ‘pattern’ of events, rather than prescribing it. That means that, at any point, the pattern could be different—the rug could contain every which way. It just doesn’t.
That’s all that’s needed for empirical predictions.
There’s that thing with the explanatory power again. Of course it has explanatory power—I’ve repeatedly now pointed out things it would explain. But most simply, of course, it explains why I’ve done A rather than B!
Again with the I-said-you-said. And again we should try for accuracy. I pointed out that you keep claiming that the notion of free will is nonsense, without supporting it by argument:
To which you replied:
Which is where my last quote comes in. So note that I wasn’t asking you to ‘state’ what you think the problem with free will is, but to support that statement, to argue for it. So no, I’m not taking back the claim that you haven’t stated what your problem is—I can’t, as I never made it. I would, however, continue to appreciate it if you were to support your position by argument, rather than just appeal to emotionally charged language.
This is somewhat brazen coming in response to a post where I not only do just that, but also already point out that you just keep ignoring my attempts to do so.
Again—this is just a complete misunderstanding of the role causation plays in empirical modeling (which is none). If there is causation, there are law-like regularities—that much is true. But concluding from the existence of law-like regularities that there must be causation is just affirming the consequent. Law-like regularities can also exist if there is no causation.
When it comes to causality, I’ll freely admit this an area of philosophy I have not encoutered before. I’ve only had a very very quick glance at it now, so that should tell me how much weight my opinion might carry.
I can see causality as an interesting area of philosophy, but when it comes to the “real world”, which I personally would call “physical reality”, I agree with the perspective that we humans have observed causality reliably enough for a long time to have made extremely good models of the workings of said physical reality. There doesn’t seem to be a problem with causality in this sense. Of course, the quantum world may be a different story, on which I have even less expertise to be able to comment, so I’ll just stick this little caveat here to cover my butt.
This thought may have been more useful linked up with something else, but I’ll throw it in for good measure: A lot of the things being discussed here make me think of: “How is it possible for things to be solid, when most of an atom is actually empty space?” That is, making a slight misstep when it comes to what I called “levels/categories” earlier is something that I think might happen more often than we realize. (This is something I’ve been mulling over for a long time, would welcome thoughts on it as well as any references to relevant literature or such.)
I have here a flipbook of a Newton’s cradle. It is very accurate and you can predict how many flips in the future each ball will reach its apex, and when each ball will touch another.
I see this analogy as flawed. Instead, in a deterministic universe, we are driving down the road and taking turns constantly. Doesn’t matter what caused us to take a particular turn, it’s the result that matters. I guess you could say it’s more relevant that the vehicle is unable to reverse or turn around.
The human will is just another part in the causal chain. It’s not unaffected by the universe that produced it. The relevance of a will is, that it leads to a particular action being taken. So it doesn’t make sense to say it’s only along for the ride. It’s an essential step in deciding the next turn on our ride. Without the will, there is no action. Excluding things like reflexes, of course.
I see. We can return to the previous point you were making,
I will agree with you that the brain is necessary for decision making. Because a universe identical to ours down to the physical laws and decision outcomes must necessarily include brains; no brains means no universe, and no universe means no decision making. But how can I say it is the proximate cause of a decision? It is no more or less necessary than every other structure or event at any point in the entire universe.
Isn’t “proximate” the key word here? What’s more, given the mind is produced by the brain, and the brain conrols the body etc., a brain is essential for a human to take any action.
You missed my edit but the reason I admitted brains are necessary for decision-making, is because in our universe you cannot remove brains and still have decision-making without contradicting physical laws.
But the same can be said of a butterfly on the coast of Africa some ten thousand years ago. But for the butterfly, […] you could not construct a block-universe according to known physical laws where I make the same decision. What makes my brain more special than that butterfly?
How does this follow? Are you simply saying that an identical universe would have brains in it? Just making sure. But it seems trivial from the meaning of ‘identical’. Well… I guess that would mean only in a deterministic universe?