[QUOTE=Indistinguishable]
Why can’t there be future facts?
(And there are certainly contexts in which we at least speak of past probabilities. When playing poker, despite other people having already been dealt particular hands, I still reason to myself “Well, there’s x% probability that Jim has an ace, y% probability I’ll get one on the river, etc.”. Seems to me, the concept of probability can be applied in lots of situations of information analysis; it has nothing particularly to do with the future.)
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There can only be future facts if the future is fixed. Since I do not accept that the future is fixed, I do not accept that there are future facts. That should be simple enough to understand.
And sure, people use probabilities as a method of making educated guesses about past facts all the time. This is a way of taking your limited evidence and stretching it as far as you can go. However, surely you’ll agree that if you add enough evidence, and the right evidence, to your arsenal, all estimates about past events will wind up at their proper values of 0 or 100%. Since, of course, there’s not really an x% chance that Jim has an ace. He either has it, or he doesn’t. Unvaryingly and for certain. That’s what we call a fact.
[QUOTE=Indistinguishable]
Yes, well, my question was, why do you believe that the past is “currently fixed” and not the future?
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I believe the past is fixed because I have memories of the past, and none of those memories include past facts changing willy-nilly. The stories I’ve heard from other people have also not led me to believe that past facts change. And, since I don’t have such an ego as to think that changing-fact-events are afraid of my species, it’s not reasonable for me to assume that past facts can change, even when I’m not looking.
I have no memories of the future. In fact, it seems like I have the ability to effect the immediate future, quite directly. If I throw a ball at a target now, sometime in the near future a ball will bounce off a wall next to the target. If I elect not to throw the ball, it refrains from missing the target. If I actually do have that choice, then the future is not fixed.
Now, I’m a computer scientist enough to know that we could in fact be causally deterministic and still probably feel like I was making decisions. I also am well-read enough to know that we all might be figments of the Red King’s dream. However, their really isn’t any kind of solid evidence for either of those theories, so I revert to the the default belief that I actually have the choice that I appear to have. If you want to change that, bring evidence to the contrary.
[QUOTE=Indistinguishable]
Ok, why does “The bit that was erased yesterday was a 0” have a truth value at this very moment rather than a probability, while “The coin flip tomorrow will be tails” does not have a truth value at this very moment, merely a probability?
It’s obvious that “The bit that was erased yesterday was a 0” has a truth value yesterday, just as “The coin flip tomorrow will be tails” has a truth value tomorrow. But why does the former get a truth value today rather than a probability, while the latter gets a probability today rather than a truth value?
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Because, unlike the past event, the future event hasn’t happened yet, and might not turn out as you predict.
[QUOTE=Indistinguishable]
Ok. Tell me again why you granted it to statements about the past, then, so that I may better grasp the missing aspect with the future.
And, perhaps you can at least accept this: Whatever the evidence that led you to grant it to statements about the past, it should at least be conceptually possible that such evidence could have been granted for statements about the future as well, right?
[/Quote]
Memory
All alone in the moonlight
I can smile at the old days
I was beautiful then
. . .
When the dawn comes
Tonight will be a memory too
And a new day will begin
And no, it is not conceptually possible that I will grant that I have memories of the future.
[QUOTE=Indistinguishable]
Fine by me. But, going along with that, I would then also say “Though multiple futures could be theoretically matched up with the current present without contradiction, that doesn’t change the fact that only one of those futures will happen.”
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And we don’t know what future is coming, any more than we know the past beyond the limits of universal memory. The latter because it’s forgotten, and the former because it hasn’t happened yet to be known.
[QUOTE=Indistinguishable]
What do you mean we don’t experience all the nows at all the points in the story? We do; we just don’t experience them all at one time, that being what it means for them to be different "now"s. Consider a movie reel. This is your timeless book determinism, but it’s no contradiction that the characters in the movie are “experiencing one single now that advances through the story at a constant rate.” It’s just that the “one single now” which is experienced on cel #21341234 is different from the one which is experienced on cel #21341235.
(I don’t know why I bothered bringing up movie reels; this point about “timeless booklike determinism” could be made just as well with a, uh, book. But movie reels seem, in my mind, to bring the proper intuitions a little more strongly).
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Yes, but look at that book again. Close it first. Put it down. Every word in the story is “now”, which renders the term nigh meaningless. At all times to the characters in the book all the pages are “now”. Why are we not experiencing everything at once? Why do we experience time at an approximately constant, forward-moving rate?
If you want to go back to the film example and point out that at every instant that the movie’s being played, only one frame a time is showing at a contant rate in a forward direction, but then one has to ask who or what is playing the movie? Who is actually causing the point of “now” to move steadily down the pre-existent timeline?
The “history is being created now” model just has the timeline growing at one end, getting longer and recording the past in stone as it goes, and “now” is just the active creating end. This seems at least as simple and more consistent my my prior observation that we appear to be able to effect the future. So this is the theory I choose to run with.
[QUOTE=Indistinguishable]
What a long definition. What is the major use of this definition? It does have a lot of stuff about the past built in. When you say “already defined”, do you mean “is defined currently” or do you mean “is defined currently or was defined at a previous instance in time”?
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It’s a long definition, be we have a nice short word that means the same thing, “Fixed”, that you can use when you’re in a hurry.
And when I say “already defined” I mean “is defined* currently”, which of course includes all things that were defined** at previous points in time, since the past doesn’t unhappen once it’s happened.
- this is the adjective form meaning “has a definition”
** this is the verb form meaning “was given a definition”
[QUOTE=Indistinguishable]
What about the corresponding notion of, let’s called it blixed, meaning “The state of the universe at time t is either currently defined [or will be defined at a later instance in time] to a specific, unvarying state, or it’s not but still can be calculated with 100% probability based on extrapolation from a later defined state”? Can my “blixed” be put to as many uses as your “fixed”? Why is your “fixed” a useful notion for analyzing Newcomb’s paradox/the smoking gene paradox/any of that? Would my “blixed” be as useful, too?
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All points in time will eventually be fixed, so all points in time already are, and always have been, blixed. So the word doesn’t really tell you anything about points in time; everything’s blixed, no matter what, and that fact tells you precisely nothing about the moments in question.
The thing about being blixed is, anything that’s blixed but not also fixed could happen a variety of different ways. You can’t [perfectly] accurately predict things that are only blixed. So I don’t see how that term’s going help you distinguish anything about the Paradox.
Now, being fixed: if your future is fixed, then you don’t really have a choice at all. When the predictor made his prediction and filled the box, he unavoidably did so in alignment with the non-choice you’re going to carry out, so if he put the million in, you can’t non-choose the thousand as well, and if he left the box empty, you can’t non-choose just the one box and get nothing. Your non-choice only has the two possible outcomes, and what your non-choice would actually be was decided before you were even born. You certainly can’t change it, even if the alternative would be the better choice.
If your future is not fixed, then you do have the option of choosing to taking both boxes, regardless of what they contain. Which will get you more money. Which you should therefore choose to do.
See? A relevent difference. Is there such a noteworthy distinction between a blixed future and a, well, actually, all futures are blixed, so and nothing.
[QUOTE=Indistinguishable]
I’m not sure what you mean by “Your first definition only applies in…”. My first definition is a… definition. I guess you are saying that (currently) the statement “The state of the universe in the year 3000 is the same as the state of the universe in the year 3000” fails to be a true statement. I doubt you are holding that it’s false; is your position perhaps that it is meaningless?
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Statements about the future do not yet have a truth value, since they haven’t happened yet, unless you’re going with the booklike “everything is already written” predetermination. In the scenario of causal determination, the truth of that statement is not technically defined, but it can be predicted in advance to a 0% or 100% probability, at which the lines between “fact” and “certain probability” begin to blur. (If your future is not deterministic, of course, you often can’t even get a 0% or 100% probability out of it.)
[QUOTE=Indistinguishable]
Again, what? “does not hold to the future”? I don’t know what this means. It’s a prospective definition; what does it mean for a definition to hold to the future?
Perhaps you are saying that my claim that “the state at time T and the state at time T+epsilon are pretty similar” holds true for past T but not future T. But… really? You don’t think that what’s in my closet today is pretty much the same as what will be in my closet tomorrow?
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That should have meant “does not hold for the future”. (As the number of words I type increasingly exceeds ten the odds that I make an error asymptotically approach 1.)
I’m saying that “is pretty similar to the state at time T” does not describe a single fixed state. Lots of different theoretical states could be “pretty similar” to the state at time T. Is it isn’t determined exactly which one of those theoretical states it’ll be at T+epsilon, then the state at time T+epsilon is not fixed, by my definition.
[QUOTE=Indistinguishable]
Well, ok… why would the absence of infallible predictors be evidence against a static timeline?
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Well, the presence of infallible predictors would be evidence for a static timeline. Such evidence is not to be found. This on its own is not an ironclad case against a static timeline by any measure, but it factors into the overall decision, much like how the total absence of unicorn hoofprints in my living room retards the believe that there’s an IPU in there.
[QUOTE=Indistinguishable]
I agree that damn reliable predictors are possible in a nondeterministic world, absolutely. We’re not talking about determinism vs. nondeterminism here except insofar as you think it’s necessary for us to be talking about them. Primarily, we’re (or at least I am) talking about “Do statements about the past/about the future currently have truth values or probabilities or what?” and “Can one have free will, even if one’s actions are reliably predictable?” and several other things, subsidiary to a discussion of Newcomb’s paradox(/the smoking gene paradox/etc).
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My answers:
For practical purposes, statements about the future have truth values iff the the future is predetermined with absolute certainty. In the alternative case, statements about the future have probabilities. In all cases, statements about the past have truth values.
One cannot have free will if one’s actions are 100% reliably predictable.
[QUOTE=Indistinguishable]
It’s very predictable, but not infallibly so, let’s say. I mean, you know as well as I do just how predictable it is that the replies to this thread will be in English. It’s at exactly that level of predictability. Is that level of predictability compatible with free will/choice/whatever?
I don’t demand that the predictor in Newcomb’s paradox be infallible; I’ve been perfectly happy, as I’ve said, to imagine that he has made incorrect predictions on occasion, but has displayed an overall track record of dominating success. My reasoning has never depended on the correlation between his predictions and my actions being “infallible”, just on it being very good.
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If you aren’t predetermined, then you have the choice of taking both boxes, and therefore always should, if you like money more than transient good feelings.
Note that the predictor being fallible does not necessarily mean that you are not deterministic or that you have free will. It just means that at times, you will be unavoidably fated to make a non-choice that gets you the $0 or the $1001000.
[QUOTE=Indistinguishable]
You’ve put two notions in there (“involuntary” and “predictable/influenced by the past”), and I’m not sure how you mean to combine them, by a disjunction or what? But, when it comes to “entirely predictable/entirely influenced by the past”, if by “entirely” you mean “infallibly”, then your statement is not entirely silly, though I would still happen to disagree, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that, if by “entirely predictable”, you mean to encompass also “not infallibly, but to a very large degree of accuracy”, then, yes, this is a silly thing to say. I can predict lots of things to a very large degree of accuracy which I think it is silly to deny are instances of free choice.
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I don’t care about non-reliable predictions. As far as I’m concerned they change the problem not one iota from predictions that are completely random. You see, choosing both boxes is always the better choice, if you like money more than transient good feelings. The only factor that determinism plays is whether you will have the choice to make the better choice.
[QUOTE=Indistinguishable]
I didn’t say it followed from everything, except if you consistently applied those principles you demand of the future to the past as well. It is your claim that “if one believes that statements about the future currently have truth values, then one must be a determinist”. I don’t believe that claim of yours, but at any rate, what I’m saying is, if you were consistent about it, it seems to me you should also accept “if one believes that statements about the past currently have truth values, then one must be a reverse determinist”.
If you don’t think consistency demands that, then tell me what the argument is that concludes determinism from statements about the future having truth values. We’ll see what goes wrong when one tries to turn it into an argument that concludes reverse determinism from statements about the past having truth values.
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What goes wrong is I refuse to use the phrase “reverse determinism” for any reason, since I think it’s a very, very poor phrase, arguably downright stupid. I am perfectly willing to state that the past has been “determined”, just like a predetermined future would be. But it was not “reverse determined”, since the determination of it did not spread backwards from the present time. It spread forwards from the start of time, in the direction of the present time. And the thing that “determined” it was that the “now” point reached and crossed those past times, “determining” what actually happened.
I use the term “determined” equivalently to my shorter term “fixed”, so by definition, if the statements about the future have truth values, then they’re predetermined. (The “pre” means they were “determined” even before the usual determining agent, the “now”, got to them.) So, by definition, if you believe in a fixed future, you’re a determinist, at least in my book.
[QUOTE=Indistinguishable]
Sure, but plain-vanilla logic is symmetric with respect to time. If an argument form was logically valid, it would remain logically valid with all the temporal references in it flipped. Whatsoever is logically demanded of the past is logically demanded of the future and vice versa, just the same as one couldn’t hope to construct a logical argument which established something about movement to the east without there also being a corresponding argument establishing something about movement to the west.
Now, this doesn’t mean there’s no way out. Just as one could hope to prove something about the east without having to accept the same of the west by taking an asymmetric premise (for example, by taking the premise “The sun rises in the east”) [or definition (for example, by taking the definition “The east is the direction in which the sun rises”)], so one could do with time. But such premises would be only contingent facts, not logically necessary ones, and also such premises and/or definitions need to be explicitly brought out and justified. (And, of course, correspondingly flipped arguments would still go through with the correspondingly flipped premises; it’s just that we might have reason to reject the flipped premises).
But you seem unwilling to engage in this identification and justification, or accept that there is even any need or use for it; rather than say “Hey, it’s interesting that there’s this temporal asymmetry in my views. I wonder what the premise is from which this springs, and why it should only be accepted in one direction”, you seem to be thoroughly resigned to “That’s the way it is, I’ve already told you, and there’s no point investigating any further. Why are you wasting your time?”.
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I am fully aware that all argument forms that rely on symmetry in their premises that isn’t there become invalid when you swap things around in the premises and render them false. (They’re still sound, not that that matters.) However I hadn’t noticed that there were that many things that were so reliably swappable that swappability should be the default assumption. The pure premiseless argument forms are only half the battle, you know. Possibly less.
The temporal asymmetry in my worldview springs from the asymmetric facts that I have memories of the past and none of the future, and my present actions tend to seem to turn out to have a causal effect on the future, and no effect whatsoever on the past. Bingo, the cause is identified. I hadn’t thought it was that subtle, really. I’ve been openly asserting that the past and future are asymmetric in properties for the entire time since I openly marveled that a living human being (you) seemed to think that they weren’t.
But, I’ll investigate futher. Do you lack memories of the past? Do you have memories of the future? When you do something in the present, does it seem to have direct effects on your memories of past events, in a seemingly causal way? When you do things in the present, do they tend to have no causal effect whatsoever on the future?