Let's redo a classic: Freewill vs Determinism

[turkalurk]

It would have to mean that our decisions are superfluous and unimportant, as our future is already set.

It could mean anything you want it to mean, but it doesn't have to mean anything. The world is what it is and made you to be what you are, but it is up to you to figure out for yourself who that person is. Why would your life lack purpose if you are not in control? Doesn't this seem to support how important the concept of control is to one's ego? The purpose of your life is to express who you are, to express being. What better expression of who you are than the decisions you make and the effect they have on the causal chain of being, because that is what will last more than any other expression of your individual frame of reference within this Reality. The impression you make on the world and the people that you interact with carries over.

If you decide to drink and drive and you kill someone you will adversely affect the lives of everyone connected to those that you killed. Maybe you have a mindset in which you seek to make amends and devote your entire life to helping others overcome their alcoholism and in the end the net result of all of your actions has a beneficial effect on the world. Maybe to the world it doesn't matter because everyone has their role to play, but to you it ought to matter. You decisions ought to matter to you because they are the only degree of control you do exert on the world.

 

[turkalurk]

It's a fair question and I think the answer is "yes and no". First of all, if you want to speak very strictly, then you have to say that the world cannot be deterministic if on micro scale it is probabilistic. Just in principle, it makes no sense.

an argument from personal incredulity, is never a good way to start. You also act like there is only one right way to define the concept of determinism. In the context of a human being able to know all the variables enough to ever predict all future outcomes, it seems rather absurd. But if everything that happens is the result on an infinite series of chain reactions then everything would be determined by the pre-existing conditions of whatever system they were born into. Whether these mechanism of these reactions involved completely random processes would be inconsequential as only the net results of these process have an effect on the causal chain.

Also, on an interesting note, eventually every possible outcome will manifest itself at some point in an infinite Existence. In fact, if Existence is infinite(and I don't mean the universe, if this universe was born from nothing and has the potential to manifest itself, then "a" universe will always have the potential to exist.), every potentiality will eventually be actualized. Not only that, but if these potential cosmic chain-reactions can not play out in an unlimited number of ways, then each way they do play out will play out an infinite number of times.


ok, now back to free will and how some people seem to think the uncertainty principle proves freewill which is absurd. If random fluctuations happening on a microscopic level can affect and influence our conscious decision-making processes, than that would restrict the freedom our will has to make its decision because it would be affected and influenced by these random fluctuations. This would bring us back to the concept that your will is interdependent upon environmental conditions.

 

[belligerent drunk]

You also act like there is only one right way to define the concept of determinism. In the context of a human being able to know all the variables enough to ever predict all future outcomes, it seems rather absurd.

Obviously we can't know every variable in order to predict the future. It's absurd, because in reality determinism doesn't always work and if you want to predict the future in an absolute sense, you have to do QM calculations, and that involves uncertainty. But what does that have to do with anything in this context? Determinism as a concept stands whether we can actually exercise it or not.

But if everything that happens is the result on an infinite series of chain reactions then everything would be determined by the pre-existing conditions of whatever system they were born into.

Why infinite? Our universe had a beginning a finite amount of time ago. Other than that, yes, that's basically what determinism is all about. However, as I said, on microscopic scale it doesn't work like that.

ok, now back to free will and how some people seem to think the uncertainty principle proves freewill which is absurd. If random fluctuations happening on a microscopic level can affect and influence our conscious decision-making processes, than that would restrict the freedom our will has to make its decision because it would be affected and influenced by these random fluctuations. This would bring us back to the concept that your will is interdependent upon environmental conditions.

Whether the mechanisms involved in our decision-making are affected by the probabilistic nature of our world to a significant degree or not has absolutely no effect on how much free will we have; it's still zero in both cases - it wouldn't be restricted or increased.

 

[turkalurk]

Obviously we can't know every variable in order to predict the future. It's absurd, because in reality determinism doesn't always work and if you want to predict the future in an absolute sense, you have to do QM calculations, and that involves uncertainty. But what does that have to do with anything in this context? Determinism as a concept stands whether we can actually exercise it or not.



Why infinite? Our universe had a beginning a finite amount of time ago. Other than that, yes, that's basically what determinism is all about. However, as I said, on microscopic scale it doesn't work like that.



Whether the mechanisms involved in our decision-making are affected by the probabilistic nature of our world to a significant degree or not has absolutely no effect on how much free will we have; it's still zero in both cases - it wouldn't be restricted or increased.

I must have read that wrong as I thought you were arguing in favor of a free will.

Why infinite? So I could lead into the implications of an infinite existence. This universe has a beggining and may very well have an ending, but I was referring to the totality of Existence which encompasses an incomprehensibly wider range of potentialities other than the one we are experiencing. There could be trillions of universes existing simultaneously yet independent. (multiverse theory) The end of this one could be a cosmic crunch which will then lead to the initial conditions of the big bang, and boom you have a universe again, (cosmic bounce theory)but this time the random mechanisms will make a new fate for a new universe. Determinism as it applies to our destiny and in the context of an Omnipotent being holds plenty of weight, and that is what we are talking about here aren't we? You realize you don't get to control which definition of a word a person applies to the message they are intending to communicate, and it is your definition of determinism that I view as out of place and irrelevant in the context of freewill. Willow definition I found more suitable for the discussion at hand. Which is why I responded in the first place. But, it appears you agree with me, that the scientific concept of determinism is irrelevant, so like I said, I must have misinterpreted your message. If you think there is zero free will, then I can't argue with that.

 

[swilow]

You're misinterpreting determinism, at least the correct formulation of it. Nowhere is it suggested that because you can predict something, that there is a plan or a plot behind it. It just means that our world (us included) behaves according to a certain set of principles, and those principles don't change in time, so knowing the initial conditions, you can predict the future. It's completely separate from the question whether our life has a meaning or a plan (it doesn't) in the general sense.

I was referring to the concept of fate which could be considered deterministic. It was in response to ElJefe3's post where he/she mentioned the idea. I don't believe in fate for a second.

Whilst I agree with your opinion, no one can really say whether our live's follow a plan. We don't really have enough data to say that. In the same way that we don't really have enough information to use our knowledge of physics to determine future paths of matter.

It could mean anything you want it to mean, but it doesn't have to mean anything. The world is what it is and made you to be what you are, but it is up to you to figure out for yourself who that person is. Why would your life lack purpose if you are not in control? Doesn't this seem to support how important the concept of control is to one's ego? The purpose of your life is to express who you are, to express being. What better expression of who you are than the decisions you make and the effect they have on the causal chain of being, because that is what will last more than any other expression of your individual frame of reference within this Reality. The impression you make on the world and the people that you interact with carries over.

If you decide to drink and drive and you kill someone you will adversely affect the lives of everyone connected to those that you killed. Maybe you have a mindset in which you seek to make amends and devote your entire life to helping others overcome their alcoholism and in the end the net result of all of your actions has a beneficial effect on the world. Maybe to the world it doesn't matter because everyone has their role to play, but to you it ought to matter. You decisions ought to matter to you because they are the only degree of control you do exert on the world.

I agree with what you are saying, so no argument. Did you notice that I was simply providing a definition based on ElJefe3's questions?

Given what we know about physics, our decisions are the only important things really. The only real game changer we have...

 

[Kittycat5]

I really like that last sentence willow, and sums up my feelings quite well.

To belligerent, I guess what I was mostly getting at is can things be predetermined if they are inherently probabilistic, nothing more. You can easily predict the daily routines of most humans too, if you look from far enough away. But if the reactions in their brains do indeed work on a quantum scale, how can this be?

I think the answer, at least in regards to QM, is though while it is probability that runs at its core, the results of these probabilities are neither suprising nor completely random. A physicist named Max Tegamark wrote a nice paper on it that isnt completely off limits to the general public. Let me dig it up, re-read as not to misinterpret, and I will post.

I agree on the event thing though, and believe this paper touches on it too.


http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/crazy.html

Here is the link. Click on the Scientific American paper on the left. There is a longer "director's cut" version also. I really like this paper as it shows how the many worlds theory and decoherance can still be deterministic despite their mathematics being probabalistic.

But it also leaves room for free-will or at least perceived free will which makes me content as I can believe in the beauty and truth of QM but still feel in control of my life.

Oh and read about Tegamark's quantum suicide experiment. It is pretty fucking nuts but elegant as well.

 

[sigmond]

Determinism is so simple.

humans are atoms, environment is atoms, everything is a chemical reaction. am i missing something??

yea. consciousness

 

[belligerent drunk]

I was referring to the concept of fate which could be considered deterministic. It was in response to ElJefe3's post where he/she mentioned the idea. I don't believe in fate for a second.

Whilst I agree with your opinion, no one can really say whether our live's follow a plan. We don't really have enough data to say that. In the same way that we don't really have enough information to use our knowledge of physics to determine future paths of matter.

Yeah, I realize what was going on now. My apologies.

To belligerent, I guess what I was mostly getting at is can things be predetermined if they are inherently probabilistic, nothing more. You can easily predict the daily routines of most humans too, if you look from far enough away. But if the reactions in their brains do indeed work on a quantum scale, how can this be?

I think the answer, at least in regards to QM, is though while it is probability that runs at its core, the results of these probabilities are neither suprising nor completely random.

Well, I did touch on that subject in my last comments. I proposed that the probabilistic nature of our universe sort of "cancels itself out" in many cases, especially in big systems. Think of it as a sort of statistics thing: some particle behaviors are more probable than others and if you have a large enough population, there will be a statistical distribution of behaviors, so to speak, that will arise every time you "measure" such a system if the conditions are kept constant. There will be deviations from the "normalcy", but the majority will behave in a way that is... more likely for them. And that is what we observe on a macro scale, because we usually observe immense populations of particles in very similar conditions. For example, a typical glass of water contains somewhere around 10^24 molecules, so even if one or two water molecules could behave in all sorts of weird ways, if you put so many of them together, then they are going to behave in a certain manner, purely out of statistical probability.

Does this sort of reasoning make sense to you?

 

[Kittycat5]

Yup, and I think we have always agreed looking back. We may differ though on free will though. Not that it matters and why philosophy is a wonderful exercise in thought alone.

 

[Nixiam]

Interesting QM debate going on between Kitty and Drunk, and don't let me dumb down the subject but I don't have a degree nor have I studied quantum mechanics formally, so my understanding is quite minimal. However, I feel I can somewhat relate it to the point I will soon get at.

To take QM as an appropriate example of determinsim, I suppose it is necessary to redefine it from traditional... ontological ways of arguing a god, where the idea is a plan has been made and all goes according to it, like what willow said earlier in response to ElJefe.

Say that QM is based, or its essence is probablistic by nature. Things that are 'pre determined' by QM can only be predicted by observers, meaning that if it is set up right, some things can and are deterministic relative to quantum theory. Take people for example, we often can look at trends and predict who is going to what, when and how. I don't want to make a cheesy reference to chess, but there you go. I would venture to say that it is only deterministic on a scale where conciousness isn't a variable fucking with things (which it would if conciousness was non-physical). For instance, using your cup of water example Drunk, the water inside typically doesn't just jump out of the cup if the cup is resting. I've not observed it. But (as an example of how non-physical conciousness could affect the state of something if it has true free will) I have observed a chess game where one party flung the board across the room. Lets say however, that conciousness is truly a physical construction, then yes flinging a board across the room most likely is predetermined, but it is less likely to occur on a scale of thousands of chess games taking place.

Let's try and justify determinism with QM. In a world where QM is the basis for everything, say that it can rapidly change its enviornment to allow a cause and affect, kind of reactionary determinism to take place. The very probabalistic nature of quantum physics is what allows determinism. In accordance ti the free will illusion, the moment we decide something, something is determined. Anything that affects the determined thought is enviornmental influence. Free will in and of itself would be just an illusion set up by enviornment factors. I don't see a plan behind everyhing, but perhaps the point I'm trying to make is the following.
Probability in the quantum level could be why parts of our lives are predetermined and why we have as much free will as we have. Albeit an illusion if it's physical, it is the only thing that can truly matter to us subjectively. Now even if our free will is predetermined by enviornmental factors, the free part is rendered useless, but the will remains. "Free Enough Will".

I became a Bluelighter soon after posting in the thread "Existiential Frustration", and the point I tried to talk myself into was that not everything I do is futile. The thought that my life or my will, or my conciousness was all fake, all useless in the end was a huge burdening thought. But I think that if we are how I described earlier, being predetermined only in a probablistic, reactionary sense, I don't think that THIS would take meaning out of life. Our will and conciousness would exist. Our individuality would remain the function of what we choose to take to heart, and our ability to change our determined aspects would be how we affect the enviornmental factors that contribute to determining us in the first place.

I don't mean to sound uneducated on the topic of QM, but sadly that's how it is. And it hurts my brain to think about it, but kind of a good hurt.

Through the duration of writing this comment, my opinion on determinism and its control factor changed greatly, but in that it made me more comfortable of accepting that it eliminates the free part by definition. However! I still say that conciousness could be non-physical! Then true free will COULD exist. But I guess I'll have to remain a fence sitter. But be happy that either one you choose to accept neither asserts that everything you do is useless in effect, nor is it nonexistant.

Life isn't pointless, it just seems that way if its planned out.

 

[Kittycat5]

I like free enough will. I think I read you are in high school, Nixiam and kudos for not simply doing the typical high school bullshit most of us, including me, did.

But the subject, or observer and the environment become intertwined according to decoherance, so our thoughts or actions can affect the object in this case. This tends to lean towards free will as a consequence of our body doing something rather than another, a result manifests. Now it can be argued that one neuron firing is enough to entangle the subject with the environment and we neither control that single neuron nor does it not react in a probabilistic way, so it is tough to decide.

But one thing that seemingly allows for free will in QM is the fact that the observer can decide which state a quantum system may be in after the experiment is done. I dont see an easy way around this because even if you say all the pre-existing conditions lead to the point where choice must be made, how was it decided exactly at the moment of choice? You cannot leave it up to statistical distribution as we can make as,many or as few experiments turn out in whichever way we want. Its very confusing because these delayed choice experiments seem to imply what we do in the now or future influence the past but most disagree with this. Nevertheless, it seems that changing configurations of the apparatus allow us to choose which state the object may be in, even if it is past the point we would expect such a result to occur. Have we thus eliminated an apparently deterministic result through choice? Maybe so, which we can then infer that such events may occur naturely and therefore we do have influence over outcomes.

But we again loop back in regards to the systems determinism has been violated but has the observers really been? Uff, I am now getting dizzy and choose to stop. Free will, baby.

 

[Jabberwocky]

Nicely said kittycat, I'm glad you brought the delayed choice quantum erasure experiment into this because it's one of those experiments people want to go away. A total mind fuck. I've been watching the Wikipedia page get rewritten on that one enough times in the last 4 years since I learned about it that I'm not sure what I know about it myself. It started to get really weird for a while. People saying "I can put a detector here but turn it off, so that I could know the path a particle took if I want to, but choose not to" constitutes a measurement and affects the outcome of which-path information recorded. I'm not sure if those experiments are real or if they are turds floating in the collective understanding, but if ever there was an experiment to examine, it's that one.

One of the more elegant ideas on the subject of quantum probability involves weak-measurement. A lot of the most interesting advances in quantum information theory are making weak measurement an integral part of the reasoning. It's experimentally substantiated but doesn't fit neatly in the current understanding of quantum measurement. Weak measurement is basically using a weak interaction (perterbative but non-collapsing) to obtain information from a system without forcing it into one state or another. You can't perform a weak measurement on a qubit but you can on an ensemble of qubits (aka Qumode). It opens up some interesting possibilities. In fact, it has yet to be shown that weak measurement precludes super-luminal information transfer for entangled systems (which is clearly impossible for entangled qubits as proven by no-communication theorem).

 

[swilow]

The last few posts have been really arousing for me. Cheers

 

[Kittycat5]

Weak measurement is bizarre from the little I know of it but must be of immense value. Do you know, levelsbeyond, a beginners guide to weak measurement as everything I have read is too technical for me as of now. I have questions but not even sure they are the right ones to ask. The quantum world keeps suprising us still.

 

[belligerent drunk]

I was thinking about this topic yesterday and one thought occurred that demonstrates how free will cannot exist if we don't want to be changing laws of physics. Basically the thought experiment is really simple: assume our actions are a result of chemical reactions starting in the brain, going onto muscles and so on. So if we look at an arbitrary chemical chain reaction A (stimulus) -> B -> C -> D -> E -> F (result #1), which would occur under normal conditions and what you would call a "standard response", sort of the person being on autopilot. So what free will suggests is that, the "we" (whatever that is), can influence that chain reaction so it goes something like A -> B -> C -> G -> U -> T (result #2). Now there are a few problems with that.

First of all, if the "I" part of the body is physical, as in it's also a result of chemical reactions, then that means chemical reactions must have "consciousness" and be able to think (because how otherwise would they decide that they want to change the course of reactions?). Moreover, they would have to be able to change laws of physics (and thus chemistry) for a moment, localized in that individual's brain, so that the (separate) chemical reactions they want to influence (as in the example above) would occur differently than normal. Makes no sense, right?

Then, if you want to assume that the "I" part is not physical, then that still leaves the latter part of the argument standing. You need to either change the laws of physics for that instant in the brain, or introduce matter (atoms/molecules/ions/whatever) into the brain that would influence the reactions, and then remove that matter. I know that that can happen under quantum fluctuations, but to my knowledge the stuff we've observed is limited to single particles, not whole collections of them; and it needs to have consciousness too, which it doesn't appear to have.

But one thing that seemingly allows for free will in QM is the fact that the observer can decide which state a quantum system may be in after the experiment is done. I dont see an easy way around this because even if you say all the pre-existing conditions lead to the point where choice must be made, how was it decided exactly at the moment of choice? You cannot leave it up to statistical distribution as we can make as,many or as few experiments turn out in whichever way we want.

Well, no, why does that imply free will? The observer may still be a quantum mechanical system working according to laws of nature, especially if it is complex enough. I don't see how this is a problem. If you release a rock from your hand, it's going to fall towards the Earth each time you do it. Then, you can give it an impulse and it will deviate from its normal trajectory, but how does that suggest that the "releaser" has any free will? I think it is a completely separate thing.

 

[Kittycat5]

Its not exactly analagous because it would be more like you drop the rock, it hits the ground and then you decide if it is on the ground or in your hand. That may be a poor description, I need to think more about it and consider the ramifications of entanglement as many of these quantum erasure experiments used entangled particles. I am working now but will ruminate later. I have to say, this is a great discussion and making me consider things I have held to be true as maybe not so.

 

[belligerent drunk]

The experiment part is not analogous, true, but the part about free will is as far as I can see. In the example you describe, you do not examine the observer, but rather present the argument as "if the observer appears to have free will, he has free will", even though it really is only an illusion of free will.

 

[Kittycat5]

Yes, I considered that with my final statement saying the system seems to not be deterministic but doesnt have to mean the observer isnt. I will admit I am not well read on philosophy so could there be something in between or a hybrid that has been considered?

 

[Nixiam]

My brain hurts.

 

[swilow]

My brain hurts.

My free-will gland hurts too.