I gave that argument short shrift earlier, but it’s an issue worth considering. First, as @Max_S has pointed out, in that form, it doesn’t quite work: situations in which there are closed form solutions to the underlying dynamics can ‘leapfrog’ any particular intermediate states and directly calculate later ones. So, for a two-body problem in gravitational dynamics, I can calculate the relative position at any point in time without taking any account of intermediate positions.
But that isn’t the case anymore for more complex situations—generally, situations that can be used to model universal computation: then, the task of finding the state at any given point in time is equivalent to the halting problem, and hence, in general unsolvable. Thus, no such closed-form solutions exist, and we’re left with having to work out the dynamics step by step. This is sometimes termed ‘computational irreducibility’. So here’s a version of the argument I’ve used before:
But I don’t really believe this argument works anymore. For one, there’s some heavy lifting done by the notion of a ‘copy’ of the system—in general, this will be what’s computationally termed a ‘reduction’, i.e. a problem in the same problem-class whose solution can be used to (efficiently) find a solution of another. But it’s not at all clear whether what we’re computing really amounts to some version of ‘the system making that choice’—there will be a map from the computation to that system, but it’s questionable whether that map suffices to proclaim identity.
But more seriously, the above depends on an implicit premise that any unavoidable feature of a process must be relevant to its outcome—which is simply false. So if I boil potatoes, the burbling sound the water makes is unavoidable in the process, but doesn’t actually contribute to getting the potatoes done. The waste heat produced is unavoidable to the operation of any machinery, but doesn’t actually, say, move my car forward.
So even if something equivalent to you making a decision occurs in every possible account of that decision being made, that doesn’t mean that therefore, your decision is relevant to what happens after. It could be just ‘waste cogitation’, an ineluctable by-product, but not itself efficacious in bringing it about. And indeed, that’s what the fact that your decision doesn’t actually hold any sway over the outcome—doesn’t actually pick one option over the other, the way a random coin flip would do—is pointing to.
Well, it’s perfectly possible to formulate general relativity in a way that starts with a foliation of the universe into 3-surfaces—this is the ADM formalism. So this gets you a ‘slicing’ of the universe that would work for a ‘film reel’ type of analogy. (Relatedly, the shape dynamics of Julian Barbour takes as its dynamical content three-dimensional geometries—‘shapes’—and can be shown to be equivalent to the ADM formulation—it’s what the above ‘Snapverse’ is based on.)
I don’t think it’s helpful to entangle the notions of causality and determinism like this—they’re logically perfectly independent ideas. Determinism can be true in a universe in which there are no causal relations, such as a block universe, or the collection of ‘snapshots’ I have called the ‘Snapverse’ above, or in which causal relations—if one should call them thus—never obtain between successive moments, but only between some fundamental substrate, e.g. Malebranche’s god. A simulated universe likewise seems deterministic from the inside, but there are no causal relations between its objects, but the motions of objects supervene on the computational processes of the underlying system.
On the other hand, it’s quite possible, and has been gaining traction recently, to think about causality in a probabilistic fashion, as in interventionist accounts—where A could be a cause of B even if the relationship between the two isn’t deterministic, but the occurrence of A simply increases the probability of the occurrence of B.
Not exactly a syllogism, but the thought process is:
Every human is an individual self organizing system
All human behavior is the result of individual experience
The scope of choices available to an individual is sum of that individual’s experience
All individual premises of the ‘If P then Q’ method are defined by the scope of individual experience - Deterministic based on experience
What we call ‘Free Will’ is choice exercised within the scope of individual experience
Universal Free Will does not exist because no individual has universal experience
:. Lack of Universal Free Will does not mean lack of choice (Per OP)
The 100 million year old Butterfly is lost in the noise and has no bearing on human behavior. But all behavior is deterministic, being the result of unique individual experience. That does not require alignment with all previous states of the universe.
Interesting point. It’s a self organizing system. The first thing the system has to do is invert the visual image. It experiences the result of random motion and develops associations with percieved images. There is no first-then. It is all simultaneous. The system creates it’s own unique conscientious out of it’s perceptions. There is no precursor.
But this I found problematic. I’m not even sure I understand what was meant by ‘simultaneous’ and ‘no precursor’.
I think this depends on what you mean by ‘behavior’. Are reflexes behaviors? What is an infant – a child after birth? Or something else? To my knowledge, very commonly, the first distinct behavior of an infant (as I understand those words) after it exits the womb, is crying. This seems to be the result of external stimuli.
It’s all behavior. The sensors respond to everything about the infant and it’s environment. A common infant activity is staring at it’s hands and moving it’s fingers.
Yes, well I agree with this in general, I just had a problem seeing what you meant by “it’s all simultaneous”. I’d say all action is followed by stimuli of some kind. Be it external or internal.
Obviously there is an imbalance of prior knowledge of philosophy in play here, so all I can do personally is to approach things from my limited point of view and try my best to parse meaning. But I do hope all can aknowledge that the ‘playing field’ isn’t absolutely level, and not get too frustrated by any approaches that may seem too pedestrian depending on your background.
Without an extensive background in philosophy, it is not a simple matter to refer to any material, as the literature has a very dense and specialized vocabulary - as any other field – and understanding any given text depends not only on being familiar with the particular vernacular, but also knowledge of underlying structures or theories.
I am fascinated by the concept of questioning causality, but lacking the sufficient background knowledge, it’s not feasible for me to study it in any significant depth for the purposes of this discussion. Still, I’ve briefly had a look at the references given, and tried to gather from them a cursory understanding of the issue. My contributions probably will come off as trying to get my homework done by somebody else, but I suppose that’s as good as understood. To put it bluntly: I’m not going to even pretend I’ve read all of any referenced materials.
If I didn’t state it clearly yet, I’m of the mind that what the conversation – like any other – basically hinges on is definitions – whether they are shared and commonly understood, and as such, useful and/or effective. And central to this I think is precisely the aspect of scope.
There’s the preamble, now onto questions.
Can you give an example of where non-causality has been observed? And/or what is the main observed evidence against causality? Also, what is some evidence for a block universe that demonstrates there are no causal relations?
What I’ve understood so far about the block universe idea is that from some perspective time is the fourth dimension, and has coordinates exactly in the same way as space does. I did note that the word ‘simultaneosuly’ was used in describing the existence of everything along the time axis, but there the term would naturally not be used within the scope of our timeline, but looking in from an external vantage point. So, nothing can exist at two different coordinates of the block universe, just like nothing can exist at two different coordinates of our physical space.
Given this, I understand the objection that a block universe can be deterministic and not contain causality. However, I don’t really see why a block universe could not be in harmony with both determinism and causality. It feels easy to me to reconcile all three ideas. After all, it has been already stated that given all interactions are calculable, all states of all causal chains can be found out regardless of what is chosen as the starting point. This to me seems work logically in the framework of a block universe.
In what I have read about the block universe, I kept running into what I see as problematic language. Again, it seems the idea of scope is not given enough thought in a lot of matters. For example:
“What I do tomorrow makes tomorrow the way it is, and the way it always has been. What I do in the past makes the past time the way it is, and always has been.”
In the above, ‘always’ cannot coherently refer to the time dimension within the block universe, but is actually referring to something else outside it. Within the block universe, ‘always’ means ‘at every coordinate on our timeline’.
(Onto different points. Sorry if there is too much here for one post… I realize now I’ve piled everything on here and the result may be hard to navigate.)
Can you give an example of evidence for occasionalism? (this may directly follow from the previous I guess)
Why would one say a coin flip is truly random? Would you say a coin flip is more random than anything else in the context of a physical universe where all interactions of forces and matter would be calculable?
I’m not sure if I’m interpreting the response correctly, but I’ll just clarify to be sure. By ‘unknowable’ I meant something that could not be calculated in any way, based on prior knowledge. I didn’t mean something humans could never actually know, but rather I’m approaching this from an omniscient perspective. So what I was trying to communicate, was essentially an event that is akin to something like quantum indeterminacy. (as far as I know) So, the crucial difference between “unknown” and “unknowable” there. Not sure whether the reference to epistemic access covers this, and I’m misunderstanding something.
Anyhow, now I’ll skip onto more about causality.
From your link:
This again made me think of scope. I’m struggling to determine from what I’ve read so far, as to what scope and context is the problem of causality actually operating in. That may be clumsily put, but I hope the meaning is clear enough…
Following on from that:
Can you give an example of evidence against the existence of causality? How would you demonstrate absence of causality in the context of physics, or say biology?
All of the above to me serves to demonstrate, that at the core of the debate lies exactly the kind of unclarity and lack of proper definitions that has been brought up in this thread. Different people interpret “free” within completely different scopes, and there doesn’t seem to be any point of concession as to how an action in one scope can be seen as free, while something underlying it still isn’t strictly speaking free. So, as Crane very astutely pointed out, it’s very important to ask what scope is enough to call anything free. Or put another way: what exactly is meant by free? And what is it trying to communicate? Free from what, or free to what?
I have no problem thinking about a chain of events probabilistically, as the state of matters before time T effecting the probability that X will occur at T. But in my view, this would only apply when knowledge of all relevant facts needed for X to occur is limited. If all factors effecting the state of matters at time T are known, as well as the state of matters required for X to occur, and all possible interactions between all possible factors are calculable, i.e. from an omniscient perspective, nothing is a question of probability and all outcomes are known. All of this, again, depends on there existing no factors, that cannot be deduced through causality.
Another thought that keeps gnawing the back of my head relates to scopes of thought yet another way. I am concerned about the risk that indeed, different people in this conversation are actually operating in different scopes or perhaps contexts, which prevents any true solutions from being reached. I am yet to learn how exactly the philosophy of causality and the physical world do or are supposed to actually relate. From the precious little I’ve read so far, this area of philosophy deals with the idea of causality from many different angles, some of which may have more to do with the strictly physical than others.
Here already, I see the text is going in a direction I don’t immediately see the point of. I know this is just an example intended to illustrate the topic, but thinking of it as a concrete physical event, this description is just woefully simplistic. To me, every event can have a multitude of factors that need to be fullfilled for it to occur. Just like it’s insufficient for the nine ball simply to be stricken by the cue ball, in order for it to go into the pocket, human thought (as produced by brains) is effected by multitudes of factors.
This post has been quite the hodge-podge of topics, perhaps approaching stream of consciousness, so I’ll stop here and hope something useful may be found in all of the above.
The absence of causality can be observed, as a practical matter, by means of a cause-effect experiment with two trials: on the second trial, remove the suspected cause and observe the effect.
I’m sure you have performed such experiments in thousands of contexts.
You could, I suppose, create a discrete block-universe. You could create out a physical 3-d model for each time-slice. Then you could physically remove some object from the first time-slice, and observe whether the rest of the slices change. If the rest of the slices do not change when you remove the object from the first slice in the collection, you have evidence that the object removed does not cause anything in the rest of the collection.
For example you might have 12 models of a 2-body solar system, representing a star and its planet. You arrange them in a line on a table such that each model represents one-twelfth of the period of the system, according to some physical law. These twelve models are twelve time-slices of an actual block-universe you created.
Now you can remove the star from the first time-slice (the first model on your table) and observe the other eleven time-slices. If the presence of a star in the first time-slice did in fact cause the arrangement of the bodies in the second, third, and fourth time-slices, and so on, you would expect to observe changes in state. But as a matter of fact there is no causal relation between different slices of at least some block-universes, neither from within nor without.
If you were to create a block-universe as described above, by using your own hands to place each object for each moment of time, you would be the God of that universe who literally caused every event.
To provide evidence, we need experiments.
First we test whether you caused the universe to exist. To test this hypothesis, you will need to do exactly what you did to create that block-universe, except this time, don’t put any objects in place.
For the rest, we test whether you caused each specific object to exist at each specific point in time. Run a trial for every object in every time-slice, the only difference being whether you place that object in that time-slice or not.
It seems to me there is some misunderstanding here. Unless you mean the experiment to be that we would attempt to construct an experiment where we can remove all possible causes for a given event, and still observe the same event happening. I’ll not go into the problems with this, unless you’d like me to elaborate.
To be clear, I wasn’t looking for a way to show that absence of a cause leads to absence of an effect. Instead, I was talking about the idea that causality may not exist, and what would be some evidence for this that has been observed.
I don’t see what this kind of a model would prove exactly. In fact, the idea seems quite circular to me. I read your instructions as: “Construct a model, the parts of which do not support each other, but their positioning follows some rules. Then start removing parts and see if other parts are affected by this.” Essentially this could be a jigsaw puzzle.
To put the instructions another way: “Construct a model, the parts of which don’t affect each other. then remove some parts and see if that affects other parts.”
I’d go so far as to say that successfully constructing a model of something cannot be evidence for the prior existence of anything identical or even similar, in and of itself.
To test whether I created a universe, I should attempt to create another?
And I shouldn’t put any objects in it?
Run what trial? For what objects?
There must be something I’ve missed here…
Let’s say I could/would build a model consisting of two-dimensional slices, and it contained “entities” that all contained data about slices behind them, but not about slices in front of them. Would this be a sufficiently comprehensive model of the sort of “film-strip universe” being discussed, and what would the existence of this model tell us about the universe we live in?
When it comes to the idea of time consisting of discreet slices that have no effect on eachother, I’m likewise interested to know about some evidence that points to this.
It may be easy to imagine a situation where an outside actor changes something at a specific point on the time-axis, but what would this look like to us from within that universe? You have to remember, it’s not like everybody is simply moving along the timeline like in space, and the past is constantly being left behind – the external actor can’t simply, say, “tinker with the past” – it’s only the past from the point of view of the entities further along on the timeline. What ever exists at the same point on the timeline can be observed by anybody at the same point.
On the other hand, if the timeline consists of discreet static slices, all laws of nature and indeed the illusion of causality have simply been constructed like an animation, for what ever reason, and nothing actually happens - we on the timeline do not really ever observe anything, and have no ‘actual’ memories. Any outside actor is free to change anything and everything, since nothing affects anything within the universe. Even if the sun was plucked out at all points between A and B, nobody would observe it, because there would be no way to observe anything, and everything in any human’s mind would simply be put there by the “model maker”. Of course it would also be irrelevant what those memories were, since they would have no interactions with anything. Even though I mentioned the entities in the model above containing data about the “time slices” behind them, this wouldn’t be necessary as such, since each slice would be static. Continuity of any kind from one slice to another would not be necessary in any way. Instead of a flipbook, the universe could essentially be a folder full of pictures that didn’t have anything whatsoever in common.
All this of course leaves me thinking, what would these entities in the folder actually be? What am I, since I experience time, and the world around me? If I’m just lines on a paper, why would I experience anything? If I have no connection to the other drawings, and there is no actual time in my reference frame, why do I have this local experience of me? How can I experience anything, if I am part of a static slice, and nothing interacts with anything?
I wouldn’t worry about that, I think we’re all pretty much amateurs here. There’s no minimum requirements for entry—it’s just a bit of online fun, after all. Although of course there does come a point where one, faced with the facts that all the other cars are coming towards one head-on, horns blaring and lights flashing, should ask oneself whether it’s truly everybody else who’s going the wrong way. But I think for now, we’re all just trying to get off the parking lot.
Right off the bat, I have to say I’m somewhat skeptical of trying to package everything into neat little concepts answering to a short and well-posed definition. For one, this sort of thing doesn’t bottom out—you need some ‘already understood’ concepts in terms of which to define everything, and you need to assume that everybody’s understanding of these concepts is the same, and how are you gonna make sure of that? But more importantly, it’s just not how the human mind works. At the bottom, it’s more like a neural network, which can identify cats in pictures with a high level of certainty, but can’t really give a short (algorithmic) definition of what a ‘cat’ is.
So excess definitions both often create a false sense of common understanding, which then has to be untangled, and may actually always fall short of the implicit understanding of a given concept we already have. That’s why I think we should rather allow our concepts to be malleable, and mutually informed by discussion—and insisting that everything needs to have a rigid, well-posed definition before one can intelligently discuss it is just to commit the Socratic fallacy.
But that’s of course beside the point somewhat.
The way I think about (non-)causality, it doesn’t really make sense to talk about ‘observing’ it. All we ever observe is what Hume called ‘constant conjunction’:
Instead of taking the notion of causation for granted, Hume challenges us to consider what experience allows us to know about cause and effect.
Hume shows that experience does not tell us much. Of two events, A and B, we say that A causes B when the two always occur together, that is, are constantly conjoined. Whenever we find A, we also find B, and we have a certainty that this conjunction will continue to happen. Once we realize that “A must bring about B” is tantamount merely to “Due to their constant conjunction, we are psychologically certain that B will follow A”, then we are left with a very weak notion of necessity.
Causality, if it is something over and above this ‘constant conjunction’, then is a metaphysical posit we make to explain how A makes it so that B occurs—how A necessitates B. But this isn’t something amenable to empirical investigation—and above I’ve given examples of ‘constant conjunction’ without such causal mediation.
Of course, one can investigate whether a concrete A might be a cause of some concrete B—that’s where the interventionist accounts come in: intervening on A, if it is a cause of B, should have some effect at B. But to say that this probes causality is to make an abductive leap, concluding that the best explanation of this sort of thing is that A causes B. But that’s by no means necessary—in the ‘Algoverse’ I described above, one would make the same observation (with astronomically high probability), but no event ever causes another, they’re just drawn from a probability distribution which has the property of giving rise to a highly compressible (hence, ‘lawful’) sequence of events.
The same thing holds true, incidentally, for the issue of determinism versus indeterminism. One might stipulate that being only able to make probabilistic predictions indicates an indeterministic universe, but it’s always possible to produce a deterministic theory that makes the same predictions (for quantum mechanics, that deterministic theory—well, one out of infinitely many possibilities—is Bohmian mechanics). The reason for this is, essentially, that you can always simulate probabilistic behavior on a deterministic (Turing) machine, i.e. an ordinary computer—both compute the same functions. So this, too, is not an issue that can be resolved empirically.
But the question of causality is one about what makes events happen, not about how they happen—i.e. the pattern of events on the tapestry of the universe may be the same in both cases, but produced differently. Let’s take a one-dimensional cellular automaton as our model universe, like Rule 110. You start with a single row of black or white cells, and each evolution step would apply a rule that, based on that pattern, calculates the distribution of the next row. The resulting pattern, continued to infinity, is the ‘history’ of the universe. If it’s created by means of an iterated application of the rule, we might call that ‘causal’: each row causes the next—more accurately, the color of a single cell in one generation is determined by its own color and that of its two nearest neighbors in the preceding one.
But I could also just take the entire two-dimensional tapestry, and color its cells black and white. The result would be something like a block universe: the color of each cell isn’t due to that of any other cells; the whole pattern is just that, a pattern on a 2-d sheet. But still, it might be that this pattern has a description in terms of some cellular automaton rule; but that rule would then merely describe the pattern, not supply a reason for why it looks that way. In particular, even if the rule described the pattern for 100, 1000, or 100000 steps, that doesn’t mean that the next step couldn’t violate it. The rule (i.e. causality, or the laws of physics) doesn’t constrain the pattern—it’s the other way around: the pattern gives rise to the rule.
So that’s the difference between a block universe and one with causal mediation.
Well, one could also think about it in such a way that the sentence ‘at 07:30 AM on January 10th, 2022, HMHW has a peanut butter sandwich’ is true at every point in time within the block universe—it is true in the year 0CE, it’s true now, and it’s true when the last stars fade and the universe succumb to eternal darkness.
But yes, it’s difficult to translate our everyday, tensed speech into a tenseless scenario. That’s why I advocate for a bit of leniency with concepts and language use: we have to make do with the tools we have.
(And to complicate matters further, there are also variants of the block universe, such as the growing block, where a sentence such as the above wouldn’t be true now or in the past, but will be true at any point in the future.)
Again, looking for ‘evidence’ for such a position is a bit of a conceptual confusion, in my opinion. It’s one possible metaphysics that might underlie the world that we have empirical evidence for—the test-bed for such ideas is whether they are coherent, explanatory, how well they fit with other reasonable assumptions about the world, and so on; but not their empirical content.
That said, one might argue that a simulated universe is occasionalist, in a sense: when in a simulated universe, a billiard ball strikes another, it’s not the first ball that makes the second careen off in a particular direction, it’s the CPU and the calculations it performs—so in that sense, the CPU acts as the efficient cause for every effect.
I don’t think a coin flip is really random in the physical universe; I was stipulating that the model universe contains at least one genuinely random event (that is, one event such that all the data of that universe’s history does not entail the event’s outcome), and calling that a ‘coin flip’ for short. It’s just a placeholder—it might equivalently be a quantum detection event, or something of that sort.
Something that can’t be calculated in any way isn’t necessarily indefinite, though. There are unsolvable problems in mathematics—such as, whether a computation ever stops—but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a fact of the matter regarding their solution: we just can’t find it. Hence, unknowability doesn’t put the same constraints on the world as indeterminateness does, and one should be careful to be mindful of that distinction.
I understand your point, but to me, that’s what discussion is for—not definition. So suppose I defined ‘free’ as ‘being able to X while being unconstrained by Y in the context of Z’. That definition is exactly as useful as far as we have a common understanding of X, Y, and Z. But how do we ascertain that? Do we go back to the definitions of X, Y, and Z? But then, the problem just iterates. This leads to Agrippa’s trilemma—we either end up going in circles, going down an infinite rabbit hole of further definitions, or just have to introduce an arbitrary (dogmatic) cut where we just stipulate what’s what.
But in discussion, we each use the word ‘free’ in different, interacting and mutually informative ways—our concepts rub off against one another, so to speak, and the way we use it will inform the context of the discussion.
Suppose I described to you how to ride a bicycle: do you then just get up on the saddle and ride off? Of course not; that’s not how learning works. But if you’ve seen me ride it a few times, and if you’ve tried yourself a few times, you’ll eventually get the hang of it—like neural networks, we fundamentally learn by training. Learning concepts, using concepts in a way consistent with one another, fundamentally works much the same way.
That’s one way to view uncertainty, as an epistemic notion (related to our knowledge of the world). But many argue that there’s also a more fundamental, ontic sense of uncertainty, where even the universe itself doesn’t ‘know’—that is, where a quantity doesn’t have a certain value we just happen not to have access to, but where there’s actually no well-defined value for that quantity. Many people find it more natural to interpret quantum mechanics in terms of that latter kind of uncertainty, as being objectively indefinite (and it can be shown that trying to inject definiteness into quantum mechanics carries other kinds of costs, such as the need for non-local interactions).
So in such a case, there is no omniscient perspective from which everything is knowable—some things are just indefinite. This means that probabilities aren’t just related to our lack of knowledge, but reflect some genuine indetermination in reality—that a certain event (e.g. a coin toss) genuinely has the potential of realizing two options, but only ‘chooses’ one.
I take it for granted that this is the case, in fact in basically every interaction. In continuing to interact, however, perspectives (or ‘scopes’) inform one another, and grow closer; I think that’s ultimately all we get.
But a physical chain of events can exist without there being any causality—see the examples I gave above. Hence, whatever causal relata are, they aren’t accessible from the mere physical description.
Sure. Like the coin example, these sorts of things are best thought of as toy models, or as coming with an implicit ‘all else being equal’-qualifier. So, ‘all else being equal’, the queue ball striking the nine ball, and the latter sinking into the corner pocket, is a different causal relation than the queue ball striking the nine ball and the latter careening off the bank. In the end, presumably, the discussion applies exactly only to whatever the microphysical particulars of the world are. But since we don’t know that (strings? Quantum fields?), we may as well talk in terms of billiard balls.
OK, I am back probably sooner than I should, but this thread was on my mind. Thanks for taking over Pseudonym!
Yes, this is a good point.
It’s true that to calculate the state of a Deterministic system you do not need to calculate every event necessarily, only every linear motion.
I don’t think it’s so relevant to talking about decisions though, since we’re not talking linear motion of course.
And also because, as you later point out, this wouldn’t work with chaotic systems. Not necessarily because we cannot predict such systems – we would just need infinite precision, which is fine for a hypothetical. But because chaotic systems feed into themselves; they are explicitly systems where the next state depends on the current state.
Firstly, you’re putting this as a retort to my statement that there isn’t a universal “now”. When what you’re describing is a particular representation of reality that nobody would claim is a universal now.
But secondly and more importantly, it wouldn’t work – it couldn’t describe a consistent reality. I alluded to the issue of different observers disagreeing about the order of events. Let’s put it in more concrete terms.
Let’s say you and I agree that the time since the Big Bang is right now T. Now, I fly to alpha centauri at 99.9999999% c. My clock says I’m at alpha cen at T+1 hour (let’s say…I haven’t done the math). Your clock says I arrived at alpha cen at T+4.5 years. Let’s say you got married in those 4.5 years.
Is your marriage before, after or in the same slice as me holidaying in alpha cen?
No observing a correlation is insufficient in most cases; we need to make an internal model of the universe to do everything from making a sandwich to getting dressed. We could be pedantic and say that that’s still talking about a correlation, but that’s just not how we think about things; we say water is wet we don’t say it’s correlated with the behaviour of wetness.
“Why did I eat a sandwich?”
“Because of the midiclorians.”
“What is that? That has no explanatory power”
“Sure it does, it’s why you ate a sandwich”
Explanatory power means more than just post hoc claiming it as the explanation. Explanatory power means we can make novel predictions (a “novel” prediction being something you did not already know to be true) and inferences.
We can make novel predictions and inferences about humans based on neurology. Meanwhile that’s just not the case for your notion of the will.
Once again: I think the concept of “free will” is garbage: it doesn’t define anything.
So, I don’t know how to answer this question. I guess I could try to think of something that I would be happy to apply the label “free will” to, but in my opinion it would be less confusing to throw it away and start over.
This is also why I don’t call myself a Compatibilist. I do believe that humans make choices whether the universe is deterministic or not. But calling myself a compatibilist would come with the baggage (and misconceptions) of the free will debate.
The thing is though, your entire life depends on finding proximate causes for things.
I don’t need to calculate every atom of every star to figure out what will happen when I depress the brake pedal of my car, or what will happen when I drop a glass vase on a concrete floor. In fact, from the moment I put my face on momma’s tit and got sustenance, I was already forming a model of the world where proximate entities and objects were more relevant to making local inferences.
This is all that is meant by proximate causes. Technically-speaking, when I drop a glass the exact force experienced by the glass will include the effect of Andromeda’s gravitational pull. However, the effect is so small that not including it in our calculations makes no measurable difference.
Measurements of the thickness and type of glass, height that I drop the glass etc, absolutely do.
Likewise with predicting what a Homo sapiens will do next. A model of its brain, and the sensory data fed into that brain is absolutely critical.
I’ve been writing a whole heck of a lot, perhaps trying to cover too many things in one go. Before my final proof read I’ll just throw in this little quip to lighten the mood:
You dropping the vase isn’t what broke it. It was the impact with the ground at too high of a velocity. In fact, we have a saying around my parts: “It’s not the speed that kills you, it’s the sudden stop.”
Yes.
I think maybe we’re talking past each other, as I was only trying to defend the very concept of proximate events.
The argument had been given that we cannot say that the brain is the proximate cause of my decisions because really the future state of the universe is the product of the entire past state of the universe. My counter is simply that finding proximate causes of events is what we do all day, every day, thousands of times.
Why, only with the brain, would we say that we need to do a whole universe calculation?
If we are going to pick a singular cause then we can quibble about what that event is as it is largely arbitrary. e.g. the vase only has sufficient kinetic energy to break because I gave it potential energy, otherwise it would simply rest on the floor.
Anyway, that wasn’t the point. The point was simply about proximate causes.
For trying to figure out what the vase will do, factors like the thickness of the glass are usually going to matter a lot more than, say, the height of a tree a thousand kilometers away.
(And yes I know I have been talking about the brain as the proximate cause but I am just trying to say that the set of events in the brain are the most significant. I don’t really think it makes sense to talk about singular causes in most cases)
As I understand so far, and what you seem to be confirming here, in my mind boils down to a “purely philosophical” idea that I keep parsing as “who knows what’s behind it all”. Still, in my view, it’s indisputable that we know a lot about causes and effects. We can purely calculate the necessary conditions for physical phenomena, and based on the calculations construct objects that work as planned - to a certain degree of accuracy. So we certainly constantly observe causality manifesting itself, in some sense, or on some level, that’s not totally irrelevant.
From this (physicalist?) point of view it seemed valid to ask for an example of how absence of causality could manifest itself. I’m not saying it wouldn’t most probably be trivial for you to give one. But I think I grasp somewhat the main objection to causality. At the risk of coming off as flippant, I’d summarise it in my own words as “we could just be parts in god’s jigsaw puzzle”.
For what it’s worth, this was my presumption. Are you saying there is no reason to posit occasionalism that arises from any observation of how the universe can be observed functioning? To your knowledge, is there nothing encountered so far in natural sciences that would serve to undermine causality or bolster occasionalism? What is your opinion about occasionalism using your listed criteria? Can you give some main argument that supports occasionalism over say causality? How does it compare to causality qualitatively? How would you compare occasionalism with solipsism?
Perhaps this illustrates more closely the difference in our views, or perhaps there’s something here that I could interpret as common ground.
Are you saying that in order to find out definitely whether causality exists, we would first need to know everything about the structure of the universe or reality?
To me, it’s a wholly different matter to say “Hmm, that ball moved, and then that other ball moved, but we don’t know why”, than to say “Hmm, solid objects can interact with each other in known ways, but what makes them solid?” The fact that we don’t yet know everything about the nature of matter doesn’t mean that we don’t reliably know many different things about how matter and forces interact. We might as well talk about balls hitting each other and question causality, because we don’t know everything about physical reality?
It’s hard to wrap one’s mind around, knowing that we actually have extensive knowledge of the physics involved, and how to determine what needs to happen in order for the nine to end up in the pouch. Not to get altogether too pompous, but it feels strange how a huge engineering endeavor such as getting to the moon and all the prior knowledge and calculation it took to achieve can easily be undermined by a simple statement that resembles something like “we don’t really know how anything happens, might be that god is playing with Lego”.
(Appologies in advance, but I made the mistake of writing too much in one go, so I will probably be leap-frogging somewhat between different points, instead of putting everything in one gigantic mega-post)
I’m not concerned about an infinite rabbit hole of definitions, neither am I pining after a ‘rigid as possible’ definition. I’m just concerned about reaching sufficient agreement about relevant starting points for discussion to be coherent and hold any real potential. In a nutshell, I don’t see how it makes sense to posit a question like “does X exist”, if all parties have a distinctly different understanding or definition of what X entails.
I don’t see there being much risk that talking about the content of central concepts under discussion would be a push down a slippery slope of having to define every single syllable. It would seem that to the extent that there is communication happening and some understanding is shared, it shows that a lot of words have undeniable utility, precisely as proven by their effective use.
I am not after some “absolute truth” about what free will means or should mean. I am simply pointing out that meaningful communication can be significantly hindered if there isn’t sufficient shared understanding of what the topic even is. Sure, free will can mean many different things, I’m not disputing that. But, simplified, if the debate is about whether X exists, and different sides understand X to entail completely different things, communication about it seems doomed to futility.
This is just based on what my experience has been around this particular topic. I’m not saying one or another definition of free will is the only correct one to be locked down, but that discussion should at least about somthing that is defined well enough, that the requirements for its existence can be meaningfully debated.
(I’m not sure how to place this exactly… Are you referring specifically to my level of knowledge, i.e. “walk before you run”? Or…?)
I’d say I could take a shot, but If I understood ‘bicycle’ to mean ‘motorcycle’, my chances of success would be significantly lower. Or even if I was just simply confused about what part of the bike you meant by ‘the handlebars’.
To me it seems your other points about definition and language were somewhat at odds with what you said about the difference between “unknowable” and “indeterminate”.