Determinism vs chance

aka: socio pathic behaviour
psychopathic behaviour
and whole host of behaviours were by the person refuses to accept their responsibilty for their actions and decisions.
pretty problematic...yes?

 

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ice aura:

yes but the probability term is a man made contruct and not a physical reality! "oh look we have a probability term hiding under this rock" [chuckle - with respect]

Sure you can apply probability to everything no doubt....for eg. I can guarrantee 100% probability that the you will have to drink water or some form of liquid withn the next 170 odd hours if you are still alive to do so! Such is the nature of mental abstraction.

No problem when it comes to using probability hey?

 

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Doreen, Glaucon, if I might add something...

If free-will is an illusion, it is so pervasive and entrenched in our development that even those who identify it as an illusion remain caught by it.

Personally I think that it is one of the things that gives rise to self-awareness / consciousness... without the concept / illusion of free-will a person would remain an instinctive creature, a "zombie". If we were "conscious" in such a state then we would be nothing but the proverbial passenger... and we would know that that was all the "I" was, watching what our body did, with no apparent ability to alter it.
And that way madness lies.

Instead our brain gives us an awareness of ourself that includes an illusion of control. But it has entrenched it within our development that we simply can not remove the illusion, because our ability to operate relies on it. To remove it is to remove self-awareness / consciousness... in my view.

Of course, there's no evidence of this, nor do I think there can be. But it's where my thoughts on the matter tend toward.

So even those of us who argue at an intellectual-discourse level that free-will is an illusion are still bound by that same illusion. We can no more act outside of that illusion than someone who argues free-will to be genuine.

And all someone needs to do to show how it is not an illusion is to identify a mechanism by which free-will can exist.

 

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Some only consider it an illusion because we simply do not know.

For what it's worth:
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind as to the reality of free will. Unfortunately at this moment I can not provide the evidence needed to prove what I know is absolutely true.
How can something be absolutely true? I hear Glaucon muttering under his breath, in horror at such a suggestion.

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Answer: By the same mechanism that manifests freewill.
like wise with objectivity.......and so on....

 

... and because I think logic dictates it to be an illusion (unless you dispute the assumption of cause/effect or wish to assume existence of the non-material "soul" etc).

If one accepts that every moment is "caused" by the moment before... i.e. the (determined or probabilistic) state of all objects at t=2 is caused by the state of all objects at t=1 then genuine free-will would require something to intercede between the "cause" and the "effect" without itself being part of "all objects".

I may not be wording this clearly... so apologies.

So let me ask you: what is "choice" when all we are dealing with is the interaction between molecules, atoms, electrons etc?
Do individual atoms have "choice"?
If not, at what stage between atoms and the full-form human do we obtain "free-will"?

Unless of course you accept the concept of the non-material "soul" or some such?

Otherwise "free-will" is an illusion, a perspective taken on the elements of our working brain that reach the conscious (as opposed to being done subconsciously).

Can we "choose" subconsicously, for example, or is "free-will" a purely conscious act?

 

Glaucon and others may consider the nature of freewill to be off topic however it is obviously central to working through this issue of randomness and chance vs determinism.

I want to post a wiki explantion of Chaos Theory which may shed some light as to the direction I would go if I was to get into it...

"Chaos theory is a field of study in mathematics, physics, and philosophy studying the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions. This sensitivity is popularly referred to as the butterfly effect. Small differences in initial conditions (such as those due to rounding errors in numerical computation) yield widely diverging outcomes for chaotic systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible in general.[1] This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future behaviour is fully determined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved.[2] In other words, the deterministic nature of these systems does not make them predictable.[3] This behavior is known as deterministic chaos, or simply chaos.
Chaotic behavior can be observed in many natural systems, such as the weather.[4] Explanation of such behavior may be sought through analysis of a chaotic mathematical model, or through analytical techniques such as recurrence plots and Poincaré maps."

Now on the face of it this theory flies in the face of those that feel the only answer is randomness or chance for chaotic or undeterminable activities.
Chaos theory indicates that indeed we can have a fully deterministic environment yet we are unable to determine outcomes due to the "infinitely exponential" nature of deterministic forces.

Could not free will be seen as akin to Chaos Theory?
In some ways we are merely improvising over the top of a determined environment and for some that improvisation certainly appears chaotic [ tongue in cheek

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]

So science does have in part IMO, a possible solution to how free will is acheived and have had it for some time. [ ~ 1880's]

So in a sense if we want to get into the nitty gritty the the thread could be reduced to the debate between randomness and chance and Chaos theory.

wiki again:

"A deterministic system will have an error that either remains small (stable, regular solution) or increases exponentially with time (chaos). A stochastic system will have a randomly distributed error"

However I would contend that given the "microscopic" nature of the research it would be impossible to say whether those random distributions were caused by factors unknown or unknowable.

So essentially there is no end to the debate except that we are only talking about observational assessment and not actually about what is happening.
Given that all systems are influenced by a universal constant, Gravity, randomness and chance must be rendered as only observational qualifiers and not reality.
I'll have a go at the rest of your post next...

 

You may be forgetting one essential ingredient to this question.
If you take all the substance that a person is made of and put it on a table in it's elementary forms, ie. carbon, hydrogen, etc etc etc... I can guarrantee you no matter how hard you try you will never be able to create a living entity/being from that substance on the table.

So to answer your question is to beg you to allow a little humility regarding the nature of life and freewill that goes with it.
One thing that is worth considering is that with out your will you would possibly be the same as a lump of carbon sitting on you desk. [ now there's a clue for you]

The soul is a metaphor for something we are yet to understand about what it takes to be alive.

again see above about what it takes to be alive and not a lump of elementary carbon.

At an instinctive level our ingrained and learned pre-dispositions could be said to make automatic choices some of which are damn hard to unlearn or re-learn [which I had to do as part of my own recovery from a stroke 20+years ago]
Freewill is able to be applied consciously to alter those subconscious instinctive dispositions we have either learned or were born with.
So free will is only available as a conscious act but most of the time to unravel and modify previous conscious choices that are now instinctively being applied and those things we were born with. IMO

 

I'm not forgetting anything... you are.
That a "person" is more than just the elementary forms but also the pattern of the activity.
So to lay all those things on a table is to destroy one aspect of what a "person" is... i.e. the pattern / activity.
The difference between graphite and diamond is not the material but the form. Likewise you can not ignore the active pattern of material when "disassembling" a living person.

Humility? On whose part? What has humility got to do with anything?

I don't agree. If you were still "conscious" you would just be a passenger inside a head that still acts.
But I do think that the illusion of freewill is an integral part of what it is to be conscious (or at least sanely conscious), such that to remove the illusion is to topple the delicate house of cards.

Some don't think so. Some consider the soul to be a non-material requirement for life, rather than merely a metaphor for something unknown. Just using the "soul" as a metaphor also says nothing about it. It is a placeholder label that brings no additional understanding beyond the word "unknown" - so why not use "unknown"?

Again read above as to why your view/argument is flawed.

"automatic choices" is an oxymoron, surely?

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Sure, but my point is whether it is possible to dissasociate "consciousness" from "(the illusion of) free-will" - as I think the two are part and parcel of the same thing - that the development of the illusion of free-will gave rise to our consciousness and vice-versa... for what use would consciousness be if it had no purpose - so it created an illusory purpose for itself (to make choices) so that it could develop, and in developing it made that illusion a core perspective.

 

See, that's precisely how I would think that a determinist would not think. I think that the determinist would never even have to recognize alternatives: "Everything is exactly as it should be, and could not be any other way."

But then again, I'm no such extremist...

I'm with you on that to a degree. Again though, this is contingent upon how we can (correctly ?) characterize the determinist position. Even moreso when it comes to ethics...

Alas, given that even a definition of the terms themselves has evaded us, an agreement upon the position of such an adherent would seem even more ephemeral..

 

So only absolutes are of value??

??

Aah but they don't.

Procedurally, they may behave such that they take them to be absolutes, but, as has been noted, they nonetheless understand that their inductively generalized theorems (..Rules, Laws, Principles...) are always specific to a limited scope.

Perhaps iceaura may come back to comment.

If not, these are always good:

Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Popper: The Logic of Scientific Discovery.

 

Indeed; and an interesting point, even if we wrestle it from ethics and move into epistemology.
Here we lapse into that familiar infinite regress problem again (Hello Descartes, Putnam..).
Assuming that one even could manage to identify the illusion, how could it remain so once it has been recognized as such?

Which would be a daunting task in the least.
Would you not say that this would require a functional explanation of causality, something that has eluded us, and does so to this day?

I mean, to identify a legitimate act of freewill, one would have to have complete knowledge of all real and possible modes of determination, and from thence, observe an act that clearly was not determined by them.

Nasty.

 

It's rapidly becoming offtopic. Particularly considering it wasn't even mentioned in the OP....

Which is precisely what I've said from the beginning: we are discussing abstractions which serve a pragmatic purpose, but make no claim whatsoever to actually referring to any ontological state.

 

Yes, that's what I meant. I mean, things are and they will be and that's it.

 

Absolutely. Which to me raises the issue of 'How do we determine what someone believes?'

We often speak as if we were unified organisms, ones whose official beliefs ARE our only beliefs.

But if we notice that the determinist is 'caught' by the potential existence of free will - illusion or reality, I will leave up in the air - I do not think we need to take their assertion that they are determinists at simple face value.

Oh, OK, you have asserted you have this belief, so I must leave that unchallenged.

We do not take such a hands off to other beliefs when, for example, actions contradict assertions.

I would like to question the necessity of that madness. Could not evolution weed out organisms that went mad? but further, the direction you took, which I think is a good one, raises the issue of why we need consciousness at all? I suppose it is considered a (rather miraculous) biproduct of evolution. For the life of me I cannot see why creatures, in a determined universe need be more than zombies. They could perform the same actions, etc. Of course there is nothing in evolutionary theory to rule out odd biproducts.

I think this is not an uncommon opinion, among scientists at least.

To me this indicates that no one fully believes in determinism.

I think more likely free will might seem more possible as other habits of mind get eroded by counter-intuitive findings - that is for those coming at the issue from the scientific end of things. IOW the way we conceive of
past
future
matter
mind/and or brain or mindbrain
causation

are very habitual and seem obvious.

And even scientists - especially those not working in physics - will have a tendency to view things in a Newtonian fashion and speaking of time in terms of travel, journey, movement - common metaphors in language - as if time was a version of space (which some conceptions of time within physics match, but some do not.) IOW when people try to forumate a mechanism - NOTE THE VERY METAPHOR YOU USED AND I REPEAT - they will try to do it in current (at best) or older ideas about the terms I mentioned above and how these terms relate. But these terms have built in limitations.

I see one hypothesis - that has a decent amount of belief support amongst physicists - that might create room for free will is the conception of the multiverse. Especially those where moment diverge into worlds. We are always bifuricating worlds from superpositions. Thus all worlds exists or at least multiple ones. Here free will could be a choice to move along one line as opposed to another.

 

Fair enough. Though I was talking to Quantum Quack. IOW the way I approach the discussion is very context dependent. He does believe in free will. So my discussion takes a very different turn with him.

OK. Problems. I see a family of beliefs, of which one is determinism, where people see themselves as determined rather than agents. One area this occurs is that people more and more see their problems as chemical imbalances. The machinery is down, problematic, and needs to be reengineered. The conceptions of matter are pre-QM and push us to conceive of ourselves as only a small portion of ourselves, this observer. That's me. My problems have to do with my chemistry. I think people are more and more being encouraged not to see themselves as agents and also to treat much of themselves as 'not them'. This also pathologizes individuals as broken (chemical) machines, rather than as agents reaction to quite likely societal and familial problems in a natural, if painful, way.

'Deserve' is a moral term, just like should is. But the fact is you used the word 'should' later on in the sentence. 'No one shud be above the law.' And you should notice that when I responded to you on the issue of 'should' you did not talk about a strawman. When I pointed it out to Glaucon, that's when you thought it was a strawman. You made statement about how you thought things (in society) should be. I still do not think this fits with determinism.

To say someone does not deserve to be punished.
is equivalent to saying
they should not be punished.

And by the way, the people who punish them and believe in punishing them, they are utterly determined. Back in the Big Bang the causes were already set in motion that make them have the beleifs they have and cause their acts of punishment.

Punishment is.
That some people are above the law is.

Should and deserve are conceptions that there is something wrong with the way (some) things are. But things simply are to a determinist. And the future is also already laid out and unchangeable. Nothing could be otherwise.

 

I am not a determinist. At least not in the strict sense. I allow for probabilistic outcomes, given QM, and will undoubtedly amend my view as I learn more.
As such they are not really "beliefs", but rather theories / hypotheses / opinions that are subject to change.
Any "label" I apply to myself is not so much to be taken as who I am but rather where I am, if that makes sense?

Apologies - it was a mere throw-away comment where I used madness as a placeholder for some other reason why such wouldn't / didn't evolve.

Depends what you mean by consciousness, as I know there are some who would hold that life = consciousness... i.e. plants are conscious etc.

Why miraculous? Is it any more or less miraculous than there being life at all?

One can know that a horror film is just pretend and yet still remain scared by it. The better the illusion on the screen, the scarier it gets - even though we know it is false.


It's late, so I'll try to get on to the rest tomorrow / later today and tackle some of the issues, and will try to give more than the 1-line retorts I seem to have posted here... but it's been a long day

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Just to be clear: that italicized quote of mine was not directed at you, but at a hypothetical determinist. I got the impression from your posts you had no hard and fast position.

I wasn't upset. I think you may be right. I just didn't see it as a necessity that an organism would have to suffer. A rather high % of the Western world seems fairly content with the role of observers. In fact I think this might be more the case than 40 years ago. On the other hand I am quite sure some people would have very bad reactions to finding out they were utterly determined.

No. And I am not making a claim it is a miracle. However if consciousness is a mere epiphenomenon, a kind of user illusion biproduct of complexity....Wow. I mean, what a birproduct. Especially if one cannot do anything with it. IOW this would mean that subjectivity was a kind of useless happenstance. I am not offering this up as proof or even mild evidence this is not the case. Just from my perspective to find out that such an enormous change is a mere side effect is really rather amazing.

I would also, in that situation, claim that we do not fully know it is false or it would not horrify us. I think people get very used to identifying with one portion of their 'organism' and then the rest is 'not really them'. But from the outside - iow in the experience of another organism - these disidentifications seem illusory to me.

Sure, no problem. I mean, I just whip stuff off off the top of my head. I mean, I've been mulling over this stuff for a while, but I roar through posts.

 

Yes. So are all the other terms.

There is nothing special about any of them, in that sense.

 

Well let me say this about that... i dont thank people deserve punishment... an i also desire to live in a society which makes its own laws an that no one shud be above those laws.!!!

I thout it a bit odd that you seemed to ignore the las part of my statment...

"an i also desire to live in a society which makes its own laws an that no one shud be above those laws.!!!"

...an didnt even queston me about it ("I" answr questons)... an then use my partial/misrepresented statment as the basis for you'r "dire" queston an statments to glucion:::

...but now that ive brout my complete statment to you'r attenton i will elaborate.!!!

What i ment by...

"i also desire to live in a society which makes its own laws an that no one shud be above those laws.!!!"

...is that i dont want to do away wit our justice system jus because i dont thank people deserve punishment.!!!

However... because i dont thank people deserve punishment... i do thank all incarsarated people shoud be treeted humainly.!!!

 

well I have been posting this point for ages and not yet has any one tackled the obvious ramifications:
Given that all systems are influenced by a universal constant, Gravity, randomness and chance must be rendered as only observational qualifiers and not reality.

The point is that randomness as claimed by science as an Observable reality is not valid in the absolute sense that THEY are using it.
And that is not even including inertia etc.

therefore what type of universal system remains if randomness/chance is illogical?