Maybe to make this more clear, the problem is that ‘if my intention had been different, I wouldn’t have picked the peanut butter sandwich’, in a deterministic universe, is logically equivalent to ‘if I hadn’t picked the peanut butter sandwich, I wouldn’t have picked the peanut butter sandwich’—because the state of the universe at the time that you pick your sandwich fixes the state of the universe at the time you formulate your intention just as much as the other way around.
That only differs if one allows for genuine openness, for the possibility that things could’ve been otherwise—say, through a random choice: then, the mapping between past and future states is no longer invertible, and you lack information that has to be supplied by the outcome of random processes. But in that case, of course, it’s the randomness that’s the reason for something happening, not your intention.
Your intention can be the reason for something only in the case where the openness is completed not by a random process, but by a willed choice—then, that choice actually supplies the information you’re otherwise missing, and tells us something about why a given event occurred.
Or perhaps for another take (and sorry for the multi-post, but I’m genuinely somewhat mystified where the disconnect lies and hence, struggling to try and be as clear as I can), imagine you’re driving at a constant speed at km 100 of a one-way street without any side roads, crossings, or forks. The question ‘how did you get here?’ then isn’t answered by saying ‘by driving past km 99 a minute earlier’, because of course you did, otherwise, you wouldn’t be at km 100 right now—the answer doesn’t actually tell us anything relevant and non-trivial. There’s only one path; of course that’s the one you took.
But now imagine you’re driving through the streets of some large city, with multiple twists, turns, and forks in the road. There, the question ‘how did you get here?’ can be answered, e.g., by something like ‘I took a left at 34th into 43rd, then took the exit 73, then made a right turn at the corner of Lincoln Ave.’, or what have you: this actually gives us an explanation of how you got here, in that it reduces our uncertainty about that fact. It transports information by eliminating other possibilities—you could’ve taken any number of ways, but did take that particular one, thus excluding all the others. But in a strictly deterministic universe, there just aren’t any alternatives to eliminate. The state of the universe a minute ago (and thus, a part of it, such as your intention) doesn’t tell us anything the state of the universe right now doesn’t already tell us, because given the state of the universe right now, its state a minute ago couldn’t have been different—there are no forking paths, no alternatives to eliminate.
Perhaps we should also be clear that the relevant alternative can’t be a merely epistemic one, i.e. just relating to a given agent’s incomplete knowledge of the state of the universe. This is about how things happen, not about what we know about them happening. So, it might be explanatorily relevant to me, if you slap the cake of my hand, that you tell me that you did it because a wasp hat set down on the bit I was about to chomp into; but it’s not explanatorily relevant to you actually doing so—while I, from my epistemically constrained point of view, may imagine several alternatives leading to your action, one of which your explanation singles out over and above the others, from the point of view of the universe, so to speak, for the laws of physics (and the cosmic initial conditions), there is no such uncertainty. You could not have done otherwise, and you could not have intended otherwise.
Contrast that with acting based on flipping a coin (provided it’s genuinely random). Before the coin flip, the question of what you’ll end up doing is genuinely open; the laws of physics are compatible with either option. So anybody with only the state of the universe before the flip in hand could not predict, with greater than chance accuracy, what you’ll end up doing, even with perfect knowledge and perfect reasoning abilities. Then, the flip actually eliminates one option—and in a real, ontic sense, as opposed to a mere epistemic one. It’s then apt to point to that flip as a reason, a cause, an explanation for your action: without the flip coming out that way (which it might not have), you would’ve acted differently. But, in a deterministic universe, given that your action came out one particular way, it couldn’t have come out differently. You’ve taken the path you’re on, because it’s the only path there is.
I mean, it’s clear that there’s a relevant difference here, no? That at the very least, the coin flip in the example is relevant in a different, more immediate, sense than your intention is in a deterministic universe? If not, in what way do you think they’re really one and the same?
OK - so, there is a deterministic framework, a physical reality with rules. But, instantaneous events within that reality are not pre-determined.
The result of an individual coin flip is not predictable, but the sum of 10,000 coin flips is predictable minus a tiny error gap. Thus we exercise freedom within the rules of a physical universe that contains some element of randomness.
The coins follow the rules without intent. Intent is a value that is externally assigned to actions. Not a cause.
I’m a bit confused. How can something in the future be given as an explanation for a present event?
This also is counterintuitive to me. Isn’t there such a thing as information loss in physics? For example in mathematics, I think if you multiply two nonprime scalars and hand the result to someone else, that person will not be able to determine from the result exactly which two scalars you used. They can only produce a list of pairs, and guarantee that you used one of the pairs from the list.
In a deterministic universe, if you’re willing to accept that the past state of the universe explains the present, you’ve also got to accept that the future state of the universe explains the present, in the same sense. That’s just a property of the laws of physics: the data at any Cauchy surface fixes the complete evolution. So for what happens in the present, you could appeal to the laws of physics and the conditions at the Big Bang; or the laws of physics and the conditions one second ago; or the laws of physics and the conditions next Friday: they’re equivalent ways of stating the same thing.
Not in a perfectly deterministic world, no (which we were positing in the part of the discussion you’re responding to). There, the laws of physics are invertible transformations of the state at any given point in time—that is, if the state now is given by s, and at time t by U_t(s), then there exists U_t^{-1} such that U_t^{-1}(U_t(s))=s. This is, for instance, true in quantum mechanics without collapse (e.g. the many-worlds interpretation). But if you introduce a collapse, then on every collapse event, you lose information, and the present state won’t suffice to reconstruct the prior state.
Doesn’t Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle dismiss determinism? There is no granularity fine enough to define the instantaneous state of the universe. It may not exist.
Not as such, no. There’s a perfectly well defined state of any system, it’s just that not all observable quantities can simultaneously have definite values. Or if they do, as in Bohmian mechanics, they can’t be simultaneously observed. But determinism only goes out of the window once you invoke the collapse dynamics upon measurement, and in some interpretations, like the aforementioned Bohmian one, it never does.
Perhaps not. Determinism, like intent, is a value we wish to assign to a system. Demonstration requires that state N and state N+1 be known for comparison. Since the states cannot be determined there is no ability to compare.
We can model parts of the system mathematically, but models are not predictive.
Isn’t determinism a form if Intelligent Design? There is no doubt that whatever IS, is the sum of everything that went on before. To convert that history to Determinism requires design or intent.
The third triangular number is the sum of the integers to the left of it on the number line. The sum of two sequential integer squares is always odd and usually prime. Is there something mystically deterministic about that?
No we’re not.
My assertion was that my brain is the proximate cause of my decisions. You are, absurdly, challenging that statement and are now doing so by talking about knowledge, when it’s just not a knowledge question.
For example, a proximate cause of me existing is my mom and dad having sex; remove that (specific occurrence of that) event, and I don’t exist. It’s irrelevant that from a god’s eye view, looking back from the universe when I was 3 years old, could calculate all the way back to my birth.
Frankly, one “bad smell” for an argument is when it is trying to fight against agreed upon definitions. Determinism is defined as the state of the universe at t0 entailing the state of the universe at t1.
Whatever extra facts you want to throw in, like being able to calculate t1 based on full knowledge of t2 cannot take away that definition or otherwise you’re not arguing against Determinism any more but a straw man.
The reason I think it is uniquely problematic is because I’m only aware of problems. It’s not defined clearly, and there’s really no good reason to suppose it’s a thing.
Actually, I’ve thought of a good way of illustrating what my position is.
Consider the subjective experience of color.
Many people, probably most people, haven’t had the “penny drop” moment of realizing that this is a real problem. They feel that the way they see the world is the way it really is.
e.g. I remember a friend “correcting” me once that insects cannot possibly see ultraviolet, because it is invisible. They must merely “sense” it.
But what about the opposite: what if there were something in popular culture usually thought of as a problem until scrutinized and realizing it isn’t a problem at all?
Well, that’s the problem of free will.
And I know you may be thinking I’m arrogant for thinking so many great thinkers through the ages haven’t scrutinized this properly. But that’s also how this has carried on so long.
It’s still a common response on this topic to handwave any objections with “Oh you need to read more Eastern philosophy, then you’ll understand” or whatever. But I have come from a scientific background where all that matters is the evidence and explanatory power, not who believed it or how much they’ve written about it.
(to your credit, this isn’t something you’ve done, I’m just ranting about FW)
It’s not the same. Because the former means questioning one of the two basic pillars of all rational thought. Without being able to do inductive reasoning, we essentially can’t function.
Meanwhile the chain of wills has zero evidence and it’s lack would make zero difference to any of our models of the universe, let alone logical thought.
I kinda wonder how that’s what you’ve taken away from my posts when I explicitly made it clear that this isn’t a knowledge issue:
In any case, you’re right in pointing out that this I about entailment:
The problem is just that the entailment runs both ways, and t_{1} also entails t_{0}, which means they’re logically equivalent. So pointing to the state of affairs at t_{0} as the reason or cause for the state of affairs at t_{1} is equivalent to pointing at the state of affairs at t_{1} as the reason for the state of affairs at t_{1}—i.e. logically trivial. It adds nothing new, it contains no information—in the technical sense, having nothing to do with knowledge—we didn’t already have.
This isn’t the case for alternatives to determinism, where you can appeal to earlier states as having genuine relevance. Let me try to illustrate again.
In a deterministic world, at t_{-1}, which may be billions of years in the past, your actions at t_{1} are completely determined. Your intention at t_{0} then doesn’t add anything, doesn’t influence anything, doesn’t have any significance for the state of affairs at t_{1}.
Now suppose that at t_{0}, a genuinely random coin is thrown. Then, the above is no longer true: at t_{-1}, there are two open possibilities for the state at t_{1}, and only by the coin throw at t_{0} is the question settled which one will become actual. In this sense, the coin throw adds something your intention in a deterministic world doesn’t, and it’s this I’ve been referring to. What we call it is ultimately of no matter—I would propose ‘significance’, but I’m half afraid you’ll dredge up some dictionary definition of ‘significance’ and claim my argument malodorous again, so I’m open to suggestions
But be that as it may, it’s clear that the coin toss is relevant to the state at t_{1} in a way your intention isn’t. That’s all I’ve been saying.
All of which are also true of causation. And there’s several problems free will would, in fact, solve, such as giving your intention the same sort of significance the coin toss has, which many people would argue is an important point, and giving a straightforward explanation for our experience of our actions as free, i.e. as bringing about one particular option out of many. We could equally well experience ourselves as acting according to chance, or having no options, but we don’t, and it’s problematic in a deterministic world to account for that—after all, whether we do doesn’t have any influence on how we act.
This is a self-refuting perspective, of course, since the notion that ‘all that matters is evidence and explanatory power’ is itself one not supported by evidence and explanatory power. Whenever people try to get away without metaphysics, what they end up with is really just bad metaphysics and unquestioned assumptions.
This isn’t questioning inductive reasoning in the least. It’s merely pointing out that we’re never observing causality at work; it’s a hypothetical posit to explain the ‘constant conjunction’ of certain events. Inductive reasoning is silent about that; it merely tells us to expect that the conjunctions we have observed in a limited domain generalize beyond that domain.
Sorry, @Half_Man_Half_Wit, I don’t get it either. Regardless of the way things actually work in the universe we live in, I don’t see how determinism implies or requires reversability. The existence of well-defined functions that are not one-to-one seems to me to imply that you can, at least hypothetically, have determinism without reversibility.
It’s not immediately obvious, but you can’t actually build deterministic laws like that. There has to be some possibility to get back to the initial state, and if some step reduces the cardinality of the set of available states, you can only get back to the original cardinality by a one-to-many transition, meaning indeterminism.
Suppose you have three states 1, 2, and 3, with transitions (1, 3) and (2, 3), then if you start in 1 or 2, you can transition to 3, but from 3, either you can only transition to 1 or 2, meaning the other can’t ever be reached, or you must be able to transition to both, which loses determinism. Hence, each transition step must be one-to-one, or imply a violation of determinism.
Because you need to set the system up in the initial state in the first place, so there must be some predecessor state leading to whatever state you start in. Or you have to invoke God setting the system up in, say, state 2.
Say the possible transitions are:
1 → 3
2 → 3
3 → 1,
then 2 has no predecessor, and can’t ever be reached by the physical evolution, hence the system never enters it, and we have a system with two states and one-to-one transitions. Or, 3 must either transition to 2 or 1, but then, we have no determinism.
I still don’t understand your reasoning. It looks like you’re arguing for reversibility by assuming reversibility.
If 1 → 3 and 2 → 3, I wouldn’t expect 3 to transition to 1, but to some further, future state (4?). And I wouldn’t expect 1 or 2 to be reachable by 3, but by some prior state (0, or –1?).
And if you’re trying to use reversibility to solve the problem of an infinite chain of causes and effects, I don’t understand how it solves that problem.
No. You start with some set of states/configurations available to the system, in the example, {1, 2, 3}, but it need not be finite, or even denumerable. Then you specify the dynamics, in this case, the transition rules between states. And then you find that if you want all states to be reachable by physical transformations, you’re left with only the options of indeterminism or one-to-one transitions. If not all states are reachable, then it simply wasn’t the right state space to begin with.
(The numbers aren’t meant to indicate a sequence, they’re just labels, you can substitute A, B, and C if it makes things more clear.)
Just write down the possibilities. As in my example above, if you have dynamics where two states lead to the same successor, then either a state can never be the end point of some transition (and hence, you can never initialize the system in that state by physical means), or you’re left with one state transitioning into two. It’s just a counting argument.