I’d just like point out that “strapped” is a synonym for “tied”, suggesting an alternative name for the particle.
Pure Newtonian determinism leaves out the random factors, and – in the famous model of the billiard balls – the future, to any length of time, is absolutely determined by the position and velocity of the balls on the table.
If randomness is permitted, then this kind of determinism has to break down over time, and perfect knowledge might let one predict the next microsecond, but not more. It sounds as if you’re voting for the second model, which was what I was asking.
I don’t think Riemann is voting for either model, rather he/she is saying that either of these models, or a combination there of, is incompatible with an intuitive notion of free will.
That’s my take as well. To the extent things are not strictly deterministic, they are random. Whether or not there is anything beyond the deterministic (any room for randomness), the point is free will ain’t it.
I’m just trying to get clarification on what is meant by “determinism.” Newtonian, determined from time zero, or a more modern, hybrid model that permits random inputs, and thus which can only be “determined” for very short periods of time. The word has both meanings, and I’d like to get clear which is in play. (I think the question has been answered, and we’re all talking about the latter meaning.)
The problem with strict determinism is that it relies on a flat model of time, such that the present moment can be defined in a discrete way. But any given moment cannot be resolved in the precise sort of way that strict determinism demands. What is happening right here, where I am right now, cannot be correlated with that very moment (which is gone now) for you, thousands of miles away. Moments are not clear cubic frames of spacetime, rather they are local events with inversen influence on less-local events.
Thus, randomness is not a required alternative to determinism as long as the definition of spacetime remains as imprecise as it is. And whatever you define as “free will” or volition actually breaks down in the face of a random model. You make choices based on reasons. There is always a why-you-did-that. If you introduce randomness, you are no longer making choices, rather you land in the numbered slot in the wheel unpredictably.
Human behavior is much more predictably than can be accounted for by either “free will” or randomness.
Can God create an integer so prime that even He cannot factor it?
The salient properties of the deity (any deity or super-being-like entity) are imputed. There are no known experiments that are suitable for studying such a being because it is illogical, superfluous and not even hypothetical. What a deity is or is not capable of is not knowable because there are no valid principles upon which its existence is founded, from which not even any conjecture can be made.
I think Riemann likely agrees with Derek Pereboom.
I like his phrase: Determinism Al Dented.
https://coursys.sfu.ca/2015fa-phil-880-g1/pages/pereboom/view
Al dente that is.
Let me just say how refreshing it feels to (e-)meet someone who finally “gets it”, and in fact you’re even explaining it better than I could. It’s a Christmas miracle, I tells ya.
How I originally realized the issue was when reading a summary of the problem of free will; it first pointed out that there could be no free will in a clockwork Newtonian universe, as all our actions were predictable. Then it went on to QM but said there could be no free will either as random events are simply random. I realized that they were implicitly defining free will as a non-predictable, non-random reasoned choice and that that very concept is nonsense.
Right, because nothing is.
Let’s say we have a magic wand that can create a world where there is free will. How do the entities in that land make decisions?
It has always struck me that it is the existential crisis that comes first. The nature of conciousness and free will are just part of that crisis, and that crisis forbids solutions that cut off regarding the particular concious identity in crisis from being in some way special. That thing that perceives a sense of identity, thinks therefore is, is not well served by considering it self as an automaton, no matter how complex. Indeed Chalmers posits that our mere ability to conceive of a zombie as proof of the existence of a hard problem. I have never liked philosophical questions that rely on our ability to conceive of a thing as part of a proof. (Still, I remember Chalmers as a snitty little undergraduate, smart but cocky with it.)
Roger Penrose wrote a long a tortured book (Emperors New Mind) and subsequently toured the planet and developed ideas that based that special entity on non-computational processes. Linking micro-tubules into quantum processes that behaved in a deterministic but non-computational manner akin to Penrose Tiling. I attended a lecture series he gave at St Andrews University in the early 90’s where he outlined these thoughts. Right then it became apparent that he was driven by a desire to avoid mortality. (And is a hidden variable physicist.) That existential crisis is never far from the surface, cheering the arguments along.
Really? Seems to me it’s the most common position, these days. In the philpapers survey of 2009, only about 18% of respondents leaned toward a libertarian free will, with most of the rest holding compatibilist views, and about 15% discarding the concept altogether. So about ~65% (not counting those who voted ‘other’) accept the argument against libertarian free will; compatibilists merely hold (somewhat sensibly, I think) that the notion under contest doesn’t actually capture what we mean by ‘free will’.
Personally, I happen to think there is some logical space to reject the argument from physical causation, but I have no strong opinion either way (this, to me, is perhaps the most interesting part of the discussion: most people hold a much stronger view on the topic than their arguments warrant). One is to point out that it really rests on a notion at least as mysterious as free will: as Hume would remind us, we don’t actually have any idea what this whole ‘physical causation’ business is supposed to mean. So appealing to it to refute free will is a bit like saying, ‘there’s no znorg; everything we think is znorg is actually phlurgh’—we replace a mystery with an enigma, and then take ourselves to have made progress.
But one can be more careful in arguing against free will. The formulation going back to Schopenhauer casts free will as a supertask: in saying ‘man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills’, he sets it up as an infinite regress—you can’t set your own will, because you’d first have to will to do so, and so on, ad infinitum. This sets up an immediate response, though: who says that supertasks are impossible? If one could traverse the infinite hierarchy of willing what we will, you’d end up with a will formed by nothing but your will. Take Thomson’s lamp: it starts, say, in the ‘off’ state, is switched on after a second, off again after a further half-second, on after another quarter, and so on. Is it on or off after two seconds? If it is either, then that state isn’t determined by its history, because for every turning-on, there’s a corresponding turning-off. So, a world with possible supertasks throws a spanner in the works of a determinate universe; and if one could likewise traverse the infinite tower of determinations of the will, what that determinate will will be at the end isn’t determined by its history.
Now, it’s unlikely that supertasks are possible in the physical world, but, if desperate enough, we need not hew to the maxim that the mind is physical. Indeed, this opens up other possibilities: take a view like Berkeley’s idealism. If everything is mind, and will is the driving force of determinations of the mind, then there is nothing besides will that determines will—hence, will is free to will as it wills. Everything that happens, happens according to will. This might seem to trivialize the concept (and one can argue that it does), but one can here make a distinction between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ will, the latter just being a kind of idealist analog to physical causation, and the former being the province of genuine agents, who act according to intentions.
This won’t convince many, nowadays, since idealism isn’t currently in favor philosophically. But one may try to import its lessons into a world-view more palatable to modern sensibilities, for instance, the panpsychist/Russellian monist view. According to this, scientific insight only tells us something about the structure of the world—the relations between things—but nothing about the inner character, the ‘inner un-get-atable nature of the atom’, as Arthur Eddington put it. We may then come round to Schopenhauer, who proposed this character to be will, itself; that’s why Schopenhauer’s own view is more complex than the oft-repeated quote makes it out to be—we are empirically unfree, but transcendentally free, and this transcendental freedom makes us genuinely responsible for our actions.
Another way to get out of the regress is to note that it’s built on a duality between actor and acted-upon, or action itself. Hence, traditions rejecting such a duality—like Taoism, Advaita Vedanta, or Buddhism—have much less of an issue with free will than views in which some intrinsic subject acts on or in a world external to it. If this is the case, then determinism and free will turn out not to be in conflict, but may rather be thought of as two sides of the same coin, and it’s only the false idea that there is a ‘core self’ separate from the rest of the world that sets the two apart in modern thinking. But one might hold this to simply nullify a traditional concept of free will, if one requires that it incorporate a fundamental subject.
An argument perhaps more interesting to those holding to the now-de facto standard physicalist world view is the argument that not all our beliefs can be evidentially justified (as otherwise, we’d enter just the same infinite regress of requiring evidential justification for our belief that a belief is evidentially justified, and so on), and hence, we need some beliefs to ground any chain of evidence (one candidate are beliefs about our own experiential states: we don’t need evidence to know if we have a headache, we just feel the pain). All evidential beliefs are then grounded in these non-evidential beliefs—our feeling pain is evidence for having been hurt, but the feeling of pain itself is non-evidential. Our experience of free agency, then, is argued to have that same status; but then, the argument against free will based on physical causation becomes circular, because to argue about anything in the physical world actually (implicitly) proposes a belief in the reality of free will.
Something similar was proposed by Kant, who argued that we know we’re subject to moral law, and thus, that we ought to act in a certain way; but ought presupposes can, and hence, we must be free to act accordingly.
Regardless: none of this has anything to do with the notion of ‘freedom’ as it is presupposed by Bell experiments and the like, so I’m not really sure how we got here in the first place. Was this hijack necessitated by the boundary conditions of the universe, or could it have been avoided?
We may or may not be able to understand what free will is, but that is irrelevant to whether it exists or not.
Here are some options, which may or may not be exhaustive.
God has free will, and has allowed humans (and other conscious creatures, if any) to have free will as well. = Humans have free will.
God has free will, but has not shared it with humans, and we have not acquired it in some other way. = Humans do not have free will.
God has free will, but has not shared it with humans, and we have acquired it in some other way. = Humans do have free will, despite God’s actions.
God does not have free will, or God does not exist; but we have acquired it in some other way. = Humans do have free will, and God either does not have free will, or does not exist.
God does not have free will, or God does not exist; and we have not acquired it in some other way. = Humans do not have free will, and God either does not have free will, or does not exist.
I tend to think the last option is probably correct, but it may be possible that we will acquire free will in the future, despite the universe conspiring against us.
I don’t see why god even factors into it. Either (some) humans have free will, or none do. As it stands, free will is untestable, and perhaps unfalsifiable, though that depends on what precisely one considers “free will” to be.
[Moderating]
While the question of free will is no doubt fascinating, it is far afield of both this thread and the General Questions category. I’m declaring it an official hijack, and directing that it stop. Should you wish to discuss it further, I welcome and encourage you (any of you) to start a new thread about it in Great Debates.