That is why I didn’t use the term “universe” or solar system.
I merely used “matter” and “time”. One cannot imagine an absence of either. I stand by my claim on an ‘a priori’ basis.
I think the biggest hurdle in the free will vs predestination debate is common sense, just as it is in physics. We see events, we see causality, and everything we see has either a clear deterministic cause or one that we can, perhaps with a little thought, break down into believable deterministic reactions. But this is where our understanding breaks down because we really have no idea what consciousness is or how it works. Obviously, if it involves any sort of spirtuality, then all bets are off. Even if there isn’t that, it doesn’t mean that consciousness is deterministic.
On that end, I recall hearing about a theory that hypothesized that consciousness wasn’t just the result of surpassing some threshold of computation complexity, but that the neurons actually interact on a subatomic level using quantum computing and, thus, may not actually be deterministic at all. Barring any kind of real experiment to test that sort of thing, which I imagine would be extremely difficult to design, we will just have to wait for technology to catch up.
I would tend to believe that if and when we can build a computer is as powerful as the human brain and we can use it to accurately simulate it and it can pass any and all reasonable tests of consciousness, including complex decision making appearing identical to human free will, we won’t really be able to say much of anything about how deterministic consciousness is.
And even if and when we reach a point where we could run such an elaborate experiment, we’re still stuck with trying to define what consciousness and free will mean. At what level is free will exercised? Is it at the highest level where, presented with options, we weigh our preferences and make a decision? Maybe it’s a level lower where our decisions are directly drawn from our preferences, but we choose those. Maybe it’s something in between. If free will exists, given the exact same circumstances, including information, preferences and events leading up to the option, will we always make the same choice or will it be from random under some distribution? If it’s always the same, is that a sign that free will is an illusion or that we will simply make the same choices in identical situations. If it’s random, is that a sign that free will is just an illusion arising from a level of randomness or that, even in an identical situation, we may end up choosing something a bit different?
One can imagine the absence of matter. One just looks at the universe within its first few hundred thousand years. Voila - no matter! None, anywhere. Not a single particle.
Time, on the other hand, is a dimension of our universe. One cannot imagine being without it because we are also functions of the universe. But time did start at the Big Bang, whether we can imagine it or not.
What we can imagine is pretty much irrelevant. Just look at quantum physics and you’ll see how the universe works in ways that are unintuitive and that we cannot make our brains get on a conceptual level. We know it’s true and that it works; but we can’t envisage it.
I didn’t use the word matter in that context. Your reply, while accurate in as much as we can know, is a completely non-sequitur.
Which is still a non-sequitur.
Since I used the generic term “many,” specifically to avoid suggesting a consensus existed, your response adds nothing.
No, it did not, because rates can change, and it is possible we have not reached the Second Derivative inflection point yet, or that our data is incorrect for space as a whole.
I have not seen a recent polling of astrophysicists, but I see no consensus at all.
Your lack of ability to imagine it does not mean it is not so. Matter did not always exist; our best knowledge strongly implies that energy did not always exist either. Strictly speaking, you coudl be right in the trivial sense that since the universe has a defined beginning, there was no “time” before that. But that does not mean time is infinite stretching out to the past.
Sorry. I’m simply not understanding your context, then.
I said “there was a time when matter didn’t exist” and you answered “yes and no”. I responded “but yes”.
If that’s a non-sequiter, then your point is going well over my head.
Whatever, dude. No need to be rude.
You used the word “likely”. That implies a consensus of some kind. I repeat my position that it is not likely.
Lots of things are possible. But consensus is firmly against recollapse.
I don’t know what to say to that. If you believe otherwise, fair enough. I’ve not read anything by a scientist who believes in recollapse in the last decade or so, but if you have then you have. I’d be interested in reading it.
The problem with saying “there is no free will” is that people then assume something more like fatalism, and believe that when one makes a decision, the feeling of discretion is a delusion.
It’s important to realize that this isn’t the case. Even if I’m a clockwork machine, all my conscious thoughts are part of that machinary. When I weigh up data to make a decision, that weighing is really how my decision is made. And at the same time we could describe it as a bunch of electrochemical interactions – but neither depiction is more real than the other.
OTOH, the free will where one’s decisions come apparently from nowhere (yet aren’t random), and where God has no culpability…yeah that makes no sense.
And note it’s a red herring here whether our universe is deterministic or whatever. I’ve never heard a description of any kind of universe, or soul, in which this flavour of free will makes any sense at all. It’s completely incoherent.
My point is that you were being xtremely literal on the use of “matter”. The poster clearly wasn’t distinguishing it from energy - which is isn’t, in this sense.
Apparently, there is need.
You may, if you wish, take it as my opinion, and I say it again. I find the probability that no other universes exists/has existed/will exist in whatever sense you care to name highly improbable. The fact that it cannot be proven industinvely does not mean that we do not have extremely good reasons (just in Quantum Mechanics alone) to think it so.
Again, you blatantly misinterpret what I wrote, despite it being clear as day. I put down several possibilities. You pick one and act as though I am pushing it. I don’t see any consensus at all, and no reason to think any such consensus would be correct even if it were.
You got it pretty much spot on. Determinism all the way. Of course, there’s the little thing with quantum states and the uncertainty principle, but we only see it to be random because that’s what we see - randomness. That “randomness” could very easily be a plotted course, and nobody would know. It is easier to err on the side of determinism because at a macro scale, everything is clearly determined, and it would be hard to imagine this determination of events being produced by randomness.
Doesn’t the problem of free will vs determinism go earlier than that? When you say something like “I decide”, it’s starting by assuming that there’s some sort of coherent “I” there that does the deciding. But while we talk about ourselves that way, (and I’m doing it right now), isn’t that an illusion of a unitary consciousness. By that, I mean, that there’s an “I” separate from our various brain processes. When I decide I want chocolate ice cream rather than vanilla, isn’t that a bunch of different impulses and brain modules, some saying “yes, chocolate” and others saying “Yes, vanilla” (and others saying, “quit it with the ice cream, fatty.”)? And if that’s the case, then doesn’t it really make the whole determinism vs free will question moot?
There’s certainly evidence that the brain has a “mini fight” every time it makes a decision.
But there’s no way we understand consciousness and the self well enough to now conclude there is no self and it’s all moot.
This is a frustrating topic because it always gets framed the same way:
- Determinism = no free will
- Not deterministic = free will
- The universe is deterministic, hence no free will.
When the reality is:
a. The typical definition of free will is completely incoherent, and makes no sense regardless of what kind of universe we live in
b. The universe doesn’t seem to be deterministic anyway. It just appears like that at a macro level.
Yeah, but to more directly get to the point: everything in the universe, including your brain and therefore your thoughts, are the product of mindless physical laws.
Out of all the options you had, plausible or implausible doesn’t matter, you finished writing the post for a personal reason that led you to take that option, a subjective impulse that prevented you from choosing another option. You couldn’t choose to get up and walk around because you were pre-determined to finish writing the post.
On the surface, the idea that we don’t have free will sounds repressive, that we’re prevented from doing what we want to do. In reality, we still do what we want to (which gives the illusion of free will), but it’s the result of subjective preferences already formed in us by the time we’re confronted with the options. To put it another way, we don’t have the free will to not do what we want either.
No.
Our discovery of quantum physics has given us a glimpse into the physical but often unpredictable quality of nature.
In addition, your reference to “free will” is completely out of context here. The term free will is mostly used to refer to human behavior.
Human beings are irrelevant to nature.
Right – mindless physical laws that give rise to minds.
What I’m saying is, it’s just a chemical thing and you consciously make decisions.
The mind is an electrochemical thinking / feeling machine, whose decisions are influenced by introspection and qualia. We don’t know how it all works yet. But just because it can be reduced to physical laws, like everything else, doesn’t mean that everything higher level is an illusion, or that a reductive account is the most “real”.
(in case it’s not obvious, I’m agreeing with you, just making a further point)
Borrowing a line from Wittgenstein, what would things have looked like, if they looked like you didn’t have free will? Do you believe you would experience some sort of coercion, pulling you into the direction of, say, chocolate ice cream? But such a thing is incoherent, since it would require being conscious of something you really want in order to have you experience coercion, i.e. something making you do one thing against your will – and this presupposes free will.
In fact, your experience is perfectly consistent with not having free will – the process of weighing up different options in order to select one is merely an algorithmic one, a mathematical derivation of the course of action from the boundary conditions. This kind of experiment thus doesn’t tell us anything about the existence of free will.
While this is right, in principle, quantum mechanics is nevertheless perfectly compatible with a deterministic universe. Only interpretations that include some sort of wave-function collapse introduce indeterminism; those in which it doesn’t happen (like many worlds, or relative states, etc.), or those in which it is merely apparent (decoherence) have as their only process unitary Schrödinger-evolution, which is reversible, and hence, deterministic.
Doesn’t determinism imply that a given state of the universe leads inexorably to another specific state? And that, in principle, if you had full information about state1 you could predict state2?
Because I’m pretty sure that QM is not compatible with that definition of determinism. Either that “full information” doesn’t exist, or we have to accept non-locality (although…if we have FTL neutrinos maybe that’s a possibility after all).
</non physicist>
[quote=“Mijin, post:36, topic:605109”]
Doesn’t determinism imply that a given state of the universe leads inexorably to another specific state? And that, in principle, if you had full information about state1 you could predict state2?/QUOTE]
And that’s exactly what you can do in QM, at least, if no collapse occurs. If you know the state at some time t1, and the dynamics of the system, you can apply a unitary transformation to derive the state at time t2. ‘Unitary transformations’ can be thought of as a sort of generalized rotation; the important property is that to each unitary transformation U, there exists an inverse U*, such that UU* = UU = 1. This means that if you have a state |t1>, you can write the evolution as U|t1> = |t2>; then, you can apply the inverse to both sides, yielding UU|t1> = |t1> = U*|t2>, i.e. not only can you construct the future state knowing the present one, but this is even unique, i.e. you can reconstruct the present state from the future state. Effectively, unitary evolution preserves information, i.e. knowing the state and the dynamics at any given point in time is equivalent to knowing the state at all times – this is determinism.
Wave function collapse, on the other hand, can’t be cast into the form of unitary evolution; it ‘discards information’. In particular, different states at one point in time can collapse to the same at a later point, thus making it impossible to reconstruct the prior state. But there are ways to do away with the collapse – the one easiest to visualize is the many worlds interpretation, in which every possible state lives on, some just decohere, i.e. become impossible to interact with one another. In this, the ‘wave function of the universe’ evolves unitarily at all times, and the whole thing is thus deterministic.
You may be getting tripped up with the uncertainty principle, which is often stated as limiting the amount of information we have about position or momentum of a particle. This is true, but creates the mistaken implication that it would be possible to acquire more information, which does run into the constraints you mentioned on ‘hidden variable’ models. However, it is now far and wide believed that quantum mechanics is complete, i.e. the information contained in the wave function describes the physical situation completely; it’s all the information there is. Thus, if we know the wave function, we know all there is to know about the system; that this doesn’t give us the knowledge of some ‘precise position’ the particle is at then is a fundamental limitation, and seems only incomplete because of the (incorrect) classical intuition that there ought to be some definite place the particle really is. But there’s just not, so not having such information does not amount to having incomplete information.
Free will just means there’s no other entity constraining your will. It doesn’t have anything at all to do with predeterminism. There’s no paradox here.
Thanks for clarification. Ignorance fought.
But of course, QM being compatible with determinism is not quite the same thing as knowing the universe is deterministic. Also a deterministic universe doesn’t particularly affect the concept of free will. Not for coherent definitions of free will, anyway.
I completely agree! In fact, I think determinism is a bit of a red herring as far as free will is concerned, for reasons that have been given in this thread already (mostly, randomness doesn’t make the will any more free). Ultimately, it’s a question of consistency, which, as you say, most definitions of free will lack.
Also, I stumbled over a recent post by Sean Carroll on the issue, who brings up the same arguments I did with respect to the many worlds interpretation, but comes to the opposite conclusion, i.e. considers it indeterministic, because to any given observer, it looks that way (every observer being confined only to a part of the total wave function). I don’t agree, mainly because I don’t think this is an issue that should be decided by the limitations of the observer – otherwise, the universe is trivially indeterministic, because no observer ever realistically has all the information needed for perfect prediction --, but I felt I had to bring this up for balance.