Determinism and Free will

Bill_McEnaney

But how do you know that determinism will allow scientists to know that those results are accurate? Even if they're inaccurate, determinism may guarantee that scientists will believe that those results are accurate. If Pyhronian skepticism is true, we can know only how things seem to us, not how they actually are. If it's true, we can't know how they actually are, even when they actually are the way they seem. How much good will correctness and rigor do us if we can't know whether anything is either rigorous or correct?

Travis_King

I don't understand how you are using the word determinism. It's not a moving, intervening entity...it's a description of the way the universe may function. If we have limitations of perception such that we can never know anything, that isn't the result of a deterministic framework.

I don't understand how determinism:
By what mechanism of determinism would this be the case?

Maui

What's the likelihood of the universe being deterministic and you knowing anything that resembles truth?




I thought perception was also a deterministic event and the way things seem to play out.
Without some sort of emergent free will science would be saying goodbye to veracity and "Hello deterministic events". You'd have no control over ANYTHING, including scientific theories and propositions.

Maui

This is entirely incorrect. It's saying that a book's story is entirely correct because the events in it follow proper science as defined within the story's plot. It sounds a bit like "the Bible is true because the Bible says so"

Travis_King

What is the likelihood of me having an apple and you having an orange?

You have control in the sense that determinism describes how (or by what mechanism) the components of the system function. If it's the case that as a result of a deterministic universe humans have collectively come up with veracity in science, then it is entirely likely and plausible that they will continue to be veracious in this way.

Yet another gross overexaggeration.

Perhaps I should have used the term logically consistent, or reliable, as opposed to accurate (though I debate this on the grounds that if something is logically consistent and repeatable, then I can think of no reason why it should not be called "accurate" as well). But my point was not to demonstrate how the skeptic is wrong, but rather that this idea:

Is untrue. If a scientist is doing his work with veracity and rigorous methods, then he should trust that repeatable conclusions are accurate. Whether we are somehow misguided and things which accurately explain observable phenomena are in some way false (or the explanations unknowable) is a matter for epistemologists. Just becasue determinism is true, a biologist needn't worry that his conclusions about observable, repeatable biological phenomena are false.

Determinism doesn't lead you away from truth simply because you have "no choice" but to go along with it. If it is determined that a person does good science and comes up with a good conclusion, then that's fine, if it is logically consistent and coherent, then others will agree. If his science is crap, then his conclusion will be crap, and others will point this out.

Logic, mathematics, all these systems which we use to examine our world. Are you suggesting that, despite constant efforts and demonstrating their consistency and coherence and applicability, that a deterministic framework means that this cohesion is an illusion? That we are fooling ourselfs into believing that 1+1=2, when in reality it doesn't?

Maui

Well, you clearly missed the point, in a deterministic environment there is no such thing as 'likelihood'.




Then you have a a very skewed perception of what 'control' means. 'Describes how' is very different to 'control'. You should discard 'control' and use 'You describe how determinism describes the components...' which is tautologiocal statement.



The question is how would humans, being deterministic processes, come up with veracity in science? You are not making sense and substituting unknowns with impossible and unseen miracles.




What you refer to as 'logically consistent' can only be regarded as 'logically consistent' by those who believe a forced deterministic 'conclusion' is carrying any weight at all. One of the distinctive features of free will is that we can doubt. If one has no doubts about one's beliefs, i guess one could label oneself a deterministic voice let off by a chemical goo.





A biologist would have all the resons in the world to doubt his conclusions had they been predetermined by events in the 17th century. I see no reason to even call them 'conclusions'.



Do you even understand that whether 'others will agree' was something that was decided by events in the far past and logic had no say in it in any imaginable way?



If we are not thinking but producing noise in accordance with events in the past, 1+1=2 can only be 'true' within the plot that has been developing for billions of years.

Travis_King

That clearly wasn't your point.

I really don't understand how this is ruled out by determinism? Care to explain this further?

Does my conclusion that 1+1=2 lose it's logical consistency in a deterministic framework?

No, he wouldn't. How do you justify this claim? If a hypothesis is made, and the experiment by which it is tested is directly observable, and a repeatable and coherent conclusion is drawn based on those results, what does it matter if the events were determined? I don't see how a need for free will comes into this at all.

Do you understand that whether or not determinism is true, things are still carried out by people (the agents of events). The scientific community will agree with something if it is logically consistent and repeatable. Are you proposing that determinism, what, tricks people into thinking things? That sounds like fatalism, not determinism.

C'mon now.

Maui

So you still fail to see a difference between being forced to make a decision and making the decision on your own? What if someone were to put a gun to your wife's head and demanded that she acknowledged that she were a jihadist? You would accept that for truth? Really?






Because you are obviously unable to tell apart forced behavior from voluntary one.




When did i claim the community wouldn't agree? Their actions would be determined by small variations of input parameters in the brain, so why should we be concerned what they have to say? As far as free will is concerned, both determinism and fatalism preclude free will and it's determinism which tricks people into 'thinking' things, if one were to hold a deterministic view of the world.



Good point. Reminds me that a lot of times we produce deterministic noise. But sometimes there's a signal, we call it 'ideas'(they drive the world) and i've come to appreciate it when the signal to noise ratio is above 50%. The bright minds who are able to produce a signal seem to be the ones who set us the most apart from the animal kingdom and the reigns of determinism.

Bill_McEnaney

Travis, is determinism true or isn't it? You seem to be contradicting yourself. First, you say that determinism untrue. Then you tell us that "Just because it is true . . ."
Consistency is a necessary condition for truth, not a sufficient condition for it. A proposition or a set of propositions is true only if it's consistent, but not if and only if it's consistent. Truth implies consistency, but consistency doesn't imply truth. Propositions are mutually consistent if and only if they can be true together. They're true if and only if they conform to reality.

Truths can be incoherent. For example, the can be irrelevant to one another. In fact, their truth and their consistency may be the only logical properties that they have in common.
Of course not. My point is that if laws of nature guarantee that we'll believe what we in fact do believe, even when that belief is false, we may be unable to know whether we know anything.

Travis_King

How should I know?

In these discussions there is typically in an implicit agreement that we'll assume one way or the other. Generally when talking about determinism we assume the positive.

Sure. Still don't get your point.

Mine is that whether or not the universe operates deterministically, if our observations don't conform to reality then our conclusions are inadequate.

Yes, if it is the case that our observations don't conform to reality, that the conclusions that we draw are inaccurate. Then, I suppose determinism is indirectly responsible for that. But determinsm itself does not preclude accurate observation of reality.

It is equally likely that our observations perfectly reflect reality, in which case every conclusion, having been determined by the initial state of the universe, is perfectly capable of being accurate, or true.

But you are not looking at the whole picture. Why does it guarantee the things we believe? How? It's not an operator, constantly fidgeting and adjusting our minds to shape our beliefs. That's what I meant when I said it describes the way the world works.

When you believe something, you do so for reasons. You have evidence, you have theories, you have experiences to weigh this evidence against, you have subconscious motivations for your beliefs, biases, etc. These things all factor into your forming a belief. This is the mechanism by which a deterministic universe would "guarantee" your belief.

Do you see what I mean about determinism not being the problem? If it is the case that we act rationally and our observations relfect reality, then conclusions drawn in a deterministic universe can be accurate, or true. If our observations do not accurately reflect reality, then our conclusions are suspect. But this does not change whether we have a deterministic framework or not.

Can you give a hypothetical example of what you mean by laws of nature guaranteeing a belief that is false?

If we look at it, it happens all the time on the individual scale. If I as a youth mistakenly believe that 1+1=3, then as you say, determinism guaranteed that I would hold a false belief. But then a teacher corrects me. "No, Travis, 1+1=2." That correction is part of the continuing deterministic chain of events, so after that I hold the belief that 1+1=2. Determinism guaranteed that, as well.

EDIT: And I still don't really see how free will helps us...

Travis_King

Admittedly, my view of the self is probably putting a bias on what you mean by "forcing you to make a decision".

What does it mean to make a decision "on your own". When you make a decision, you are doing it because you want to for the most part, right? If determinism is true, the want doesn't go away. You still want to do that thing, and when you do it, I don't understand why it automatically becomes something that is not your own.

The problem, I think, stems from what we mean by "you", not the cause of the decision.

Forced by what, may I ask?

Because the mechanism by which determinism would "force" you to do something would be, basically, by "making" you feel your desires, emotions, and motivations. Basically, determinism "forces" you to choose as you want to choose?

Where do you get this idea from?

So now we come to the crux of things. Does the rest of the extant universe operate deterministically, and it is only our consciousness which divorces us from that?

Bill_McEnaney

Everyone,

I'm sorry I may not know how to answer your questions now when I've just listened to the Stanford Encyclopedia's article about causal determinism. Unfortunately, the physics is too, too hard for me because I'm too ignorant about the mathematics that it uses.

After my computer read me the encyclopedia article, one description of determinism sound much like Carl Hempel's Hypothetico-Deductive Model of Scientific Explanation. To sum it up, Hempel believes that with a set of initial conditions and the laws of nature, you can deduce what will happen. The laws and the conditions imply that the events will happen.

The encyclopedia article suggests to me that for determinism to work the way Hempel's model says that scientific explanation works, you'd need to know everything about the universe's current state, however elusive that knowledge may be.

Travis, I misinterpreted what you told us about consistency, coherence, cohesion and repeatability. Although I didn't think much about Plato's Early Socratic Dialogues, my misinterpretation of you thoughts reminded me that in those dialogues, Socrates believes that logical consistency is a sufficient condition for truth. You seemed pragmatic enough to settle for consistency, coherence, cohesion and repeatability if scientific arguments were inconclusive. I'm sorry because I suspect that I barely skimmed what you wrote. Shame on me and on my impulsive streak.

Pythagorean

This really is a non sequitor. It has nothing to do with the discussion of determinism. The question isn't whether you can make choices, but whether you actually choose to make choices. That is, determinism doesn't contest "will", it contests "free will".

Consider a system... information enters the system and it does an internal calculation and the system move five feet left; alternatively, an external force pushes it five feet left. The question of whether those internal calculations are deterministic is different than the question of whether the influence came from internally or externally.

Travis_King

Bill, this question has been debated for centuries...it seems you aren't alone in not knowing the answers!

With regards to your last point, yea, mostly I take a pragmatic stance on the idea of "truth". However I do recognize that the pragmatic "necessary conditions" for truth are not really all that convincing from an epistemological standpoint.

I know some people who hear the pragmatic argument and think it amounts to saying, "Well, this seems to be good enough. Let's stop here, I'm pretty sure we're ok saying we 'know' this to be a 'truth'." It's hard to say who's right.

For anyone else still reading, I'd like to see a discussion on what the necessary conditions are for "free". As one might have deduced from my argument a couple pages back, I believe that freedom is whatever we want to do. Our freedom is only challenged by coercion, which is to say anything which 'forces' us or demands that we do something which we do not agree with, or which we do not want to, or cannot, do.

Pythagorean

I think that's my problem with free will too. I don't really know of a reasonable definition. Here's how I see the definitions:

will: the ability for an organism to carry out its chosen action

free will: the idea that organisms chose actions independently of determinism, i.e. independent of influences from the physical world.

In behavioral sciences, this isn't a very helpful idea. There would be no way to model it. But more importantly, it seems to be unnecessary. People's decisions are found to ultimately come down to a combination of biological, psychological, and social factors, all twisted in a complicated spiral of emergent behavior. It's like dropping a handful of tic-tacs. You can't predict exactly what pattern will come out because off all the small differences in initial conditions, but you know all the forces involved and how they generally statistical outcomes over a large number of trials.

Bill_McEnaney

That's comforting. The older I get, the more I need to question what I believe. I'm something like Socrates. He thought long and hard about why anyone would believe that he was wise. "Well," he said to himself, "maybe it's because I know that I'm ignorant." As you know, in the Early Socratic Dialogues, he usually made fools of proud people who thought they already knew the right answers to his questions. Too often, they only repeated widely-held false opinions.
I believe that truth consists of conformity between the intellect and reality. I say "intellect" first because too many people want to conform reality to their their intellects, not the other way around. I want to know how things actually are. If the word shows me that I'm wrong about something, it's time for me to change my mind. I'm not going to be a relativist about truth.

Maybe I told you guys about Karl Popper's asymmetry between confirmation and refutation. The idea is that any scientific inductive argument is always inconclusive when it supports its conclusion. However many experiments confirm it, there's no contradiction in saying that there may be a counterexample that disproves it conclusively. You might count a million white swans when you're testing your theory that all swans are white. That strong statistical evidence will help you write a strong inductive argument for that conclusion. But that conclusion is still false because some swans are black. Some scientific belief may only seem to be knowledge.
Many do that. But you can still ask the pragmatist why they believe the pragmatic theory about truth is true. If they appeal to usefulness when you ask them to argue for that theory, their argument probably will be useless for proving what they want it to prove. After all, it probably will be circular.
The trouble is, at least for me, that some coercion can be internal and other coercion can be external. I can still ask whether laws of nature determine what I choose by governing what happens in my body.

apeiron

Another way to look at it is that global constraints create local freedoms. So anything that is not globally forbidden, can - indeed must - happen.

So toss a die and the constraints - all the information that went into creating a six-sixed object that got properly thrown - do determine a lot, but are then indifferent about which face actually lands.

This seems merely an epistemological view of determinism. But it becomes ontological if you accept that there are quantum or chaotic limits to measurement - if you believe you can never obtain the complete information needed to constrain a system's degrees of freedom to a single determined outcome.

So this re-frames the physical level model of determinism.

You then want to step up to ask how human choice fits with this model. Again, a key point often overlooked is that it is our awareness of social and physical constraints on our personal degrees of freedom that creates a sense of being choosers. If we know we are meant to do one thing, this is why we know equally that there is now the option of acting in contrary fashion.

But then what we actually do becomes a mix of this social "coercion", the world's physical limits (we can't decide to levitate, etc) and the information we supply ourselves (all the stuff like our memories, goals, physiological state, etc).

So the effective freedom we have is to combine a variety of kinds of information to weave our own highly personalised states of global constraint (our moment to moment states of intentional awareness). And these mental states then act top-down to highly constraint (tightly determine) the activities of our bodies (we shift our feet - they have no choice - because we want to get to the kitchen).

Freewill remains a perennial debate because people are attached to a particular mechanical notion of determinism (one where the global constraints, like the laws of physics, are treated as mysteriously immaterial - the necessary information must be held in the mind of God perhaps ). And then the opposite of determined is taken as random.

But a systems approach demands that we account for all the information driving a process in a material fashion. And so already we are asking the question, well who determined things to be this way? Who constructed the global constraints that define the local degrees of freedom in play?