Determinism

[dr_mabeuse]

So this is what men think about when they're not thinking about sex? Explains much.

Yes, it is. Tragic isn't it?

That's why you guys should put out more.

 

[Penelope Street]

Yes, it is. Tragic isn't it?

That's why you guys should put out more.

LOL That should be in someone's list of worst possible come on lines.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

St. Thomas Aquinas (or St. Augustine, I keep getting them mixed up) suggested that free will and determinism were essentially the same thing. In his context, God had a Plan. Part of the Plan was allowing Free Will. However, if X doesn't know the Plan, or doesn't understand the Plan, then X's actions are essentially random- driven by immediate, short-term perceptions and delusions, which essentially puts X in the billiard-ball category. A complex billiard-ball, but a billiard-ball nevertheless. This is a 'determinist' state, where there are actions and reactions. On the other hand, if X understands God's Plan, there's only one thing to do- follow the plan. X is free not to, but if he actually understands the Plan, he will, because it just doesn't make any sense not to. So, the basic choices are A) lack of understanding, leading to a deterministic situation that 'feels' like free choice; or B) Understanding, which leads to actual free choice, with only one sensible choice, which appears to be determinism.

Whoever this guy was, I'll bet he was a blast at parties. I'd like to see him act that one out in charade.

So if I understand this, God has a plan which includes free will. If you don't understand that--like animals don't--then you don't have free will. If you do understand the plan containing free will, then there's only one way for you to act, which is in accordance with the overall plan.

Sounds to me like God's doing a double shuffle here. If we have free will then we're free to reject his plan, which means we don't have free will. So if A then not-A.

That's not allowed in this universe.

 

[cantdog]

It's all about the ego.

Didn't get laid = Not meant to get laid

Got laid = Free will

So, it depends on when you ask.

You are profound, imp, I've always thought so.

 

[Alessia Brio]

.....

 

[cantdog]

I ordinarily have no use for Descartes, frankly. So I'm noting, without changing my opinion of him, tht he clumsily described the situation.

It is much as he says, I find, although I dispute his terms a bit. Roxanne states baldly why I go for the free will thing. Mab says the argument is weak in the extreme, and by objective standards, so it is. Fact is, though, here I am, and every blinkin time I had a choice, I was free to make it, as far as I can tell. The argument for consciousness is weak in the same way, but by cracky I feel conscious until the second drink or first bowl.

I appear to myself to be here, to inhabit a point of view. Experientially, that POV is not my body, for i can observe my body; not my mind, for i can observe that too. Not my roles, as teacher, lover, mentor, victim, secretary, father; not my name; not my profession, my opinions. All that stuff is object stuff. I see it, watch it, feel it, do it, observe it. And I'm the subject, so the object isn't me.

But my evidence for the existence of the POV is purely non-rational. I am somewhat confirmed by others, if I can believe their testimonies. Other people tell me unequivocally that they have a consciousness, and we talk long enough to be sure we agree what we mean by that.

This POV is a damn hard thing to demonstrate scientifically. And free will is worse, since there really isn't supposed to be one. But the evidence of my and others' experience is believable. To me. Logic can disprove my consciousness and deny my free will if it likes. All very interesting. But for me, both things are experiences I replicate every hour. So I go ahead and believe in them, as I do in time, space, causality, and any number of other unprovable things.

I think a flaw in your laws of physics thing is that causality itself un unprovable.

 

[Purple Sage]

Whoever this guy was, I'll bet he was a blast at parties. I'd like to see him act that one out in charade.

So if I understand this, God has a plan which includes free will. If you don't understand that--like animals don't--then you don't have free will. If you do understand the plan containing free will, then there's only one way for you to act, which is in accordance with the overall plan.

Sounds to me like God's doing a double shuffle here. If we have free will then we're free to reject his plan, which means we don't have free will. So if A then not-A.

That's not allowed in this universe.

Which you can take as a demonstration that free will and determinism are, at a very minimum, not what people take them to be- or that God isn't constrained by your notions of what is not allowed in this universe. I tend to take the former position, since I think the argument works pretty well without God in it at all. Of course, without God in it, the argument depends on a kind of ultimate reductionionism- in this case, the reduction to insignificance of the unknown consequences of actions. Since, as Godel and others have demonstrated, this state of affairs is impossible, the issue of free will and determinism is largely mooted in the real world.
Quantum physics offers a pretty well supported position that, at the smallest levels of reality, knowledge is an inherently limited quality. While it's true that larger aggregates of quanta exhibit more and more predictable behavior, there is an implication that certainty, at any level, is to be found only in the statistical sense. When we add in the notion of the Observer Effect (which I personally see as valid only it's most limited, laboratory sense), we get a sort of inversion of the free will/determinism picture: now 'objective reality' is being determined by the perception of the observer, turning the billiard-table inside out. On the other hand, the 'perception of the observer' is itself a product of aggregate, macro-scale processes that show every appearance of operating by purely deterministic laws...

 

[dr_mabeuse]

It's been a long time since I took Quantum, but as I recall, the Observer Effect boiled down to this: if you expect the electron to act as a wave, it acts as a wave. If you expect it to act as a particle, it acts as a particle. In the days when classical physics insisted it had to be one or the other, this was a problem. We now know that the electron is both, or neither, so there is no Observer Effect, or rather, the Observer Effect is a problem only for the Observer, not for the electron or the universe at large.

To be honest, I really don't understand the rest of the argument, but it seems to me that the freedom to either understand or not understand some plan seems to already presuppose free will, or at least require some mechanism by which one could do one or the other, and I don't know what that mechanism is.

Cant, I would agree that it certainly does feel like we have free will, but a solid determinist would say that that feeling is an illusion, that all the trickiness you employ in trying to be unpredictable in choosing door A or door B is actually already pre-determined, so there's nothing free about it.

All in all, it's a very troubling question, which is why I usually stay away from it. It touches on the even more troubling problem of how consciousness arises from inanimate matter, and how the superconsciousness we call attention or self-awareness is stacked on top of that so that we're able to think about what we want to think about.

But I maintain that unless we can come up with a way for there to be true randomness in the material universe, we have to be determinists. If you believe that we are material beings, and that material obeys natural laws, then

My personal feeling is that, while we can't achieve true randomness, in extremely complex systems like our brains, we can come to a place where complexity itself mimics randomness enough for there to be some wiggle room.

That's about all I know, and that's where I usualy quit.

 

[Purple Sage]

Mmmm... I think you may have boiled your quanta a little too long. They get tough and stringy that way... but string theory is a whole 'nother thing. The Observer Effect also applies to issues of location, vector, etc.- in otherwords, everything about a 'particle'. From a quantum standpoint, particles are energy quanta, which are described as probability wave fronts predicting the 'actual' position, etc. of a particle in a cloud of 'virtual' positions, etc. The act of observation resolves the probability matrix into a single position. As I recall, the Copenhagen interpretation, generally considered standard, maintains that there is no 'actual' position until the wave front is collapsed in the act of observation. Hence Schroedinger's Cat- neither alive nor dead until the box is opened.

As for 'true randomness', what exactly does this mean? Quantum theory seems to be predicated on rather large amounts of randomness- quantum foam, for instance, pretty much fills the universe, albeit spasmodically. One fairly popular model of Big Bang Theory sees a sort of massive quantum-foam type of event as the initiator of the universe.

Chaos Theory, on the other hand, replaces randomness with complexity and sensitivity to 'initial' conditions. Sufficiently complex and sensitive systems might as well be random, because they cannot be adequately predicted. Which takes us back to the whole free will and determinism just being labels for different levels of consciousness thing.

 

[JamesSD]

Mmmm... I think you may have boiled your quanta a little too long. They get tough and stringy that way... but string theory is a whole 'nother thing. The Observer Effect also applies to issues of location, vector, etc.- in otherwords, everything about a 'particle'. From a quantum standpoint, particles are energy quanta, which are described as probability wave fronts predicting the 'actual' position, etc. of a particle in a cloud of 'virtual' positions, etc. The act of observation resolves the probability matrix into a single position. As I recall, the Copenhagen interpretation, generally considered standard, maintains that there is no 'actual' position until the wave front is collapsed in the act of observation. Hence Schroedinger's Cat- neither alive nor dead until the box is opened.

As for 'true randomness', what exactly does this mean? Quantum theory seems to be predicated on rather large amounts of randomness- quantum foam, for instance, pretty much fills the universe, albeit spasmodically. One fairly popular model of Big Bang Theory sees a sort of massive quantum-foam type of event as the initiator of the universe.

Chaos Theory, on the other hand, replaces randomness with complexity and sensitivity to 'initial' conditions. Sufficiently complex and sensitive systems might as well be random, because they cannot be adequately predicted. Which takes us back to the whole free will and determinism just being labels for different levels of consciousness thing.

Nicely put

I don't believe in Determinism for a second. Yes, my brain chemistry effect me. Heck it IS me. Yet, I'm more than that. I think therefore I am.

 

[bg23]

Nicely put

I don't believe in Determinism for a second. Yes, my brain chemistry effect me. Heck it IS me. Yet, I'm more than that. I think therefore I am.

what more are you?

and what does the fact that you exist have to do with anything?