Determinism and Free will

Pythagorean

Sure it is. We can design a computer that deterministically chooses things based on it's current sample (stimulus) and it's collection of samples over its history (memory). If we wanted to make it really biological, we could throw random metabolic perturbations in, that have more to do with internal resource management than explicit decision making.

Maui

A computer can't design anything on its own. It lacks creativity and imagination. You have to program every single step and let it run. This isn't choosing, this is programming.
A computer cannot choose to ponder or not to ponder the nature of determinsm, as machines cannot ponder.


What's the likelihood of placing an electrical activity of the frequancy range of Alfa, theta and beta waves(coupled with the supportive chemical reactions as in a functioning brain) on a pile of dough and it becoming conscious of itself?

Pythagorean

Neither can a human do anything on its own. They go through a long period of "supervised learning". In fact, they will die without a caretaker during critical periods.

Qualities like "creativity" and "imagination" aren't very quantifiable, but qualitatively, feral children don't display much for them either. You can theoretically emulate creativity and imagination but having erroneous associations being made (which is fairly typical with humans). Humans produce a lot of senseless information in an attempt to produce reliable predictions. That is essentially what creativite works consists of: senseless (or vague) information (sometimes mixed with functional information.. but once it becomes purely functional it's now technical and not creative).

This isn't choosing, but it's not really programming either. We design computers NOT to have the flaws that humans have. If you ever have written in C though, you CAN actually get random results with sloppy programming.

Maui

We did everything we have acomplished so far on this planet on our own(unless one believes in divine intervention, we are the ones who built the civilization we have today, we walked this road alone). True, that was in a group, not on our own, but we could communicate and reason the communicated information. Machines cannot exchange information, they exchange frequencies. You need a mind for frequency to become information.


Yes, from a purely physical perspective they are hard to quantify(i cannot be of help eaither). That doesn't mean you cannot observe its achievements - just look around in the room you are sitting in.





I agree with most of your points about determinism playing a very big role, where my opinion differs is the inclination to think(or imply) that determinism can even in principle account for all of human behavior and its achievements. I find that notion rather absurd.

Pythagorean

But probably not with intention. It just kind of accumulated into what it is now through mutual negotiations, much like life formed from mutual particle negotiations.



Of course, I'm not asserting that for sure it's all deterministic. It could be random too. But that doesn't really lead to free will either. I just wanted to demonstrate that things we percieve as having free will are often deterministic processes (as shown by Libet's experiments).

Free will is kind of a ghost. It would imply that we can evade causality, which is a strange concept (something we could find "rather absurd" as well). It has no evidence, so far, it's just a feeling we (including myself) have. But I think you have to really face that feeling and question it if you want to have an honest discussion.

I have lots of feelings about lots of things; a lot of them are bogus and lead me to false conclusions. I've been shown over and over again when my feelings are wrong through constant reflection and self-analysis.

skeptic2

No one is saying that choices are made out of the blue. There are many factors that weigh in choices but those factors are not deterministic.

For instance there are many factors that determine how one drives a car. There are personal preferences, which lane to drive in; there are physical laws, how fast you can stop; there are legal laws, stopping at a red light; and there are desires, stopping off for a latte on the way home from work. None of these represent a causal relationship to how one drives nor are they chaotic in nature.

For the universe to be deterministic, all those factors must have existed at the Big Bang, otherwise known as Deism.

Pythagorean

I think I've addressed your comments in post #90. Not sure if you saw it before you posted.

Maui

So you want to delve into the fundamental nature of things and you singled out 'free will' as if it's the only thing that appears like a ghost under very close scrutiny?




I've pushed a lot of bounderies and I am questioning everything all the time, probably past the safe sanity level. There exists a personal experience, that's all i can say. I can believe a framework if it fits all the evidence and stick to a worldview that i would consider correct. If it fits some of the evidence, but not other, i revert to "my personal experience" framework and remain sceptical.


When determinism addresses the issue i raised in post 82, i may join the camp.

Pythagorean

Freewill is the red hering in behavior science. It's not needed to explain anything. It's a feeling we have (that's been questioned by Libet's experiments) so I do so on rational grounds agasinst my natural intuition. Though, by now, I've developed an intution about causality in behavior.

Again, this is independent of whether things are deterministic or not. We could feel pain whether we did so as a passive observer or an active observer. This is the "hard problem of consciousness". It's not solved.

However, it does fit into determinism. It's an evolutionary mechanism. Pain and pleasure are the mechanisms that allow for survival (pleasure leads to sustainance and reproduction, pain leads to death).

Travis_King

Determinsm says nothing about feeling pain. That isn't in its purview. The nature of the self is quite a different question than the nature of the interactions of extant things, both living and non.

Do you know what determinism actually argues? It isn't simply, "Free will is wrong"...

Edit, Seems Pythagorean beat me to it.

chiro

One thing I think people should really think about is what information people have, what they don't have, what they are assuming based on what they don't have and as a product of what they have (i.e. inference) and also how far the projectification of information is being made.

The projectification of information means that you start with a tonne of information and you project it down to a tiny sub-space for something like a lower descriptive capacity in order to be able to make sense of it.

In a lot of these examples, the space being considered is extremely narrow and basically doesn't take into account the myriad of other information, relationships and dependencies that exist.

When people talk about determinism, funnily enough people often talk about a form of local determinism rather than a global determinism and so they focus on an extremely narrow form of cause and affect which is always going to result in problems from the start.

Nikitin

determinism seems like a bunch of BS to me. I mean, sure, if the universe behaved like a clock-work and had 0 degree of randomness, then determinism would be guaranteed.

However, from what I've understood from quantum mechanics, I'm fairly sure atoms behave randomly to a certain degree. Ergo there can never be any determinism.

Travis_King

Determinism on a macro scale doesn't necessarily require determinism on a quantum scale...

Pythagorean

Cohered macro-systems (ensembles of quantum particles) behave in a deterministic manner. Furthermore, quantum effects have been shown not to play a relevant role in decision making in the brain (there were a few papers published in response to Penrose, whose view is considered crackpot by physical chemists and neuroscientists).

Maui

So there obviously exists something that feels pain and it can not be accounted for in physical terms, but we are somehow supposed to believe that that same "it" that feels pain and can reason can not make sovereign decisions? If there is a hard problem of conciosuness, there is a hard problem of free will.

Travis_King

You are still misunderstanding determinism, Maui. Decisions are A-OK within a deterministic framework. Determinism speaks to the mechanisms by which those decisions are made.

Nikitin

How do you know that these "macro-systems" behave _perfectly_ deterministically? As long as there is some randomness on the atom-level, there must be randomness on the macro level, even if it is statistically insignificant..

In addition, our brains work purely by chemical reactions and electrical impulses. If atoms and molecules behave randomly when those take place, our thoughts cannot be perfectly deterministic.

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disclaimer: I have only started my first year in uni... so don't murder me now.