Determinism and Free will

Quinzio

But how can this be proved ?
Imagine one takes a decision and the state of the universe is A
I mean, one should re-create the same exact situation A, and then observe that the subject takes another decision. But as we have not a time machine, that's impossible.

Quinzio

After watching a Sam Harris conference a question came to my mind.
Maybe it's been discussed several times, but I couldn't find any of that.

The starting point is that, according to determinism, the state of the universe in instant $t_1$ could be theoretically determined knowing its state at a previous instant $t_0$.
Well, let's take it for granted, which is not by the way.
Let's go back in the past, where every instant is predetermined by the instant before.
We may eventually arrive to a beginning, let's say the big bang.

Question is: what if all the matter at a certain moment (the first moment) was in an homogeneous state ? If all the matter was compressed into a hot dense sphere of homogeneous matter, then how can determinism be true ?

Otherwise, there must always be, in any moment, as much variables, as we find in a successive moment, otherwise it's not possible to determine the causes of the actual state of universe.
Is then determinism compatible with big bang theory ?

josh1492

you can recreate events. I can move something and put it back and move it again. Each event is unique but for the sake of determining the result of specific actions in relation to an effect you can do simulations. Kinda feel like I am explaining that that big red ball in the sky is what causes it to be light outside haha...clearly there is some disconnect here.

But I think you are trying to describe how our actions are pre-determined because of all past events and how we have no control of our own actions because we are merely byproducts of our environments. This may be somewhat true in a probabilistic sense..IE people in low income areas are X amount more likely to do Y. Or if you give someone an STD they are whatever % more likely to perform certain actions. But on the individual level it really is up to the individual. It does beg the question, if it is all individualistic, they why do probabilities exist? I think it is because the accumulated influence from a macroscopic event is much greater over a macroscopic area than it is felt over an individual area. In essence I can choose what affects me but when viewing a population as a whole you are going to end up with probabilistic trends. Even me as an individual I am subject to certain probabilities that certain events will influence my actions but then again I really do have the final say about what I choose to influence me.

DrSnarl

Nice. :) I had not heard that one before.

chiro

One thing that I think is important in analyzing determinism has to do with a kind of local analysis in comparison to a non local analysis.

The local analysis could be seen as the current way we analyze things. Local analysis in this context refers to analyzing things in terms of local changes. Non-local analysis refers to analyzing things in terms of non-local changes.

The local analyses usually refer to what we know as differentials or finite differences. In other words when we want to analyze a system, we look specifically at how things change either instantaneously for a continuous/analytic system in terms of the finite differences between immediate time-steps for a finite difference system.

One thing that should be considered is a non-local analyses. In other words, instead of looking at completely local changes, instead consider what happens when we relate changes that are non-local. In other words, instead of dx/dt for a continuous system, consider CX/CT where CX is the change of X with respect to a non-local difference (as an example CT might be 1, 1.5 or even 100 or it could even be variable.

By doing this we consider the possibility that in systems of extreme complexity when we analyze them in terms of a local analysis, that same system may actually yield some more important information when considered in a non-local analysis.

What this means intuitively is that instead of thinking in terms of cause and effect in the short-term, we think about effects in the long term where there is a kind of delay involved instead of having effects happening instantaneously like we naturally expect them to in our local analysis way of thinking.

RAuld

Functor97,

I believe that much of your arguement is otiose; what is relevant is the reality that we experience day-to-day. It seems to me that each of our exisences is governed by three factors:

1. Genetic a priori: that is, evolved characterisitcs such as ability to reason, sensory acuity, genotype and phenotype.

This is the deterministic part of our existence, that we cannot change, also known as fate.

2. Free Will: that is, the decisions that we make day-to-day, where our reason sorts between memory, current evidence from our senses, and our imagined future.

You must surely agree that you take decisions every day, some that you regret; you must sometimes choose to learn something new, and so are choosing to change your future experiences.

3. Chance: those things in life which you simply cannot control and can only account for in retrospect; the wheel of fortune of people who you walk by in the street, jobs that appear at opportune moments, etc.

It is your choice to make the most of these opportunities, or not.

In my view, there is determinism, free-will and random chance!

jduster

Assuming that there is random chance, then our "decisions" aren't meaningful either. They're just like "dice rolls" and it would be no more consequential than if we were at a fixed path.

beanybag

Jumping in, hi.

The disconnect is that you don't seem to see that those are different events. It is not a recreation of the first event in any way, because it occurred at a different time (a few seconds later) under different circumstances (you have memory of moving the cup, it will have some warmth and oils from your hand from previously moving it, perhaps the liquid inside the cup also heated up from some of the kinetic motion, etc.) and probably the events differed as well (you moved the cup a a few centimeters differently than before, in a different arc, with different finger placement, etc.). You cannot recreate the exact event because the past affects the future. You have to undo every moment up to the specified one in order to recreate it. How do we observe you taking a different action than before, however? There'd have to be some outside observer (which is already suspect since observing is not a one-sided action) who is also outside of time - it isn't doable.

This is also why I think the debate is meaningless. Free Will is an incoherent idea. So what if we have free will and therefore possess the ability to take a different action than we otherwise would have? We only ever end up taking one - it's functionally deterministic (not taking into account relativity, quantum uncertainty, and observer perspectives). And further, why would we take a different action? I take the actions I take because they are the ones I choose based on reason, conditioning, past experiences.. everything that makes me myself. Would any other decision really be mine? It simply doesn't make any sense.

And this is why I think the idea of Free Will is dangerous. It lets people blame others for their circumstances. Sam Harris is exactly right that if you were them, atom for atom, you could not make a different decision than them because you would be them. It allows people to shrug off social responsibility by thinking that people choose to live the way they do. You recognize patterns of causality and still choose to toss them aside for some 'comforting' notion of free will and I don't understand it at all? Why would you want to be 'free' of your memories, reasoning, and bodily functions? They ARE you!

EDIT: I should also point out that free will seems to necessarily require a form of dualism or at least a working model of 'self', which is another concept I find to be incoherent (and illusory). I don't mean to entirely dismiss the qualia of self, free choice, and so on (as I go on to dismiss said qualia), but psychology does seem to have firmly destroyed most of our conceptualization of self - asking if 'I' made a choice can really break down semantically when we parse what 'I' am. I can't imagine a monoist out there who would advocate free will (speak up if I'm wrong please) and it would seem most are physcalists/naturalists (implying determinists or free will denialists). Dualism has enough problems as is -adding to that the incoherency of free will and you have a concept that should really be discarded.

John Creighto

My self (the molecules and fields which make up me) contain information of who I am and how I behave. The action of these molecules and forces are moved by my thoughts, and the laws which govern these movements I call reason. These laws are not fixed because through my thoughts and the information I process from the environment, I change these rules to achieve my purposes (my will). Well, what I do is governed by laws; who I am, is an interaction of my choices, my thoughts and my environment.

Well, what we do is determined by our state in a deterministic and partly random manner, we learn from each action, and grow in our understanding of the environment. Perhaps free will is not what we do in any one situation but rather the intelligent process we go through in where we learn how to adapt our actions to the environment to achieve our ends.

apeiron

Broadly speaking, freewill boils down to the claim we can make conscious choices. We can always imagine doing otherwise.

If you trace the origins of the idea, you can see in the early days it was the realisation that individuals could do something other than their societies or base desires might demand. The reasoning mind could rise above two kinds of unthinking prompts for action.

This was turned into a dualistic religious deal. The source of this now absolute freedom to chose came from a soul.

Then it became a monistic scientific illusion. Newtonian mechanics reduced all causality to atomistic action and so it seemed any naturalistic account of consciousness or reasoning must be micro-deterministic. Outcomes are already fixed by their initial conditions.

So we go from a mild claim - we can make reasoned choices - to an opposing pair of extreme claims, an immaterial cause guarantees free choice vs material cause forbids actual choice.

As you say, the way out of this bind is just to accept that causes are hierarchical. There are macro-level causes (reason, conditioning, past experiences) that functionally determine our choices - or indeed, are responsible for shaping the fact of choice in the first place.

If you insist on viewing the issue of choice through a Newtonian microscope, the only causation you can see are the micro-circumstances of some present moment. It is how all your molecules are at some instant that "completely determines" the next instant - and every further instant to the end of time.

But if you step back to see the wider view, then you can see that the reasoning brain is having its choices "determined" by past experience, conditioning, etc, and having its actual choice "determined" by some anticipation of future results. So the initial conditions driving some moment of action indeed have a macro-extent, reaching both into a remembered past and a predicted future.

Newtonian particles of course do not enjoy this kind of extended, memory/expectation based view of the world so it is irrelevent to their modelling. But some notion of macro-scale causation is essential for the modelling of more complex systems like brains.

At this point, scientific fundamentalists will again want to insist that macro-causes still reduce completely to micro-causes. But this remains a hollow claim unless the micro-view can actually show us how to construct the kind of global "emergent" states that constitute a memory/expectation based process of conscious reasoning and choice.

Compare for example any attempt to model human choice in terms of molecular motions and game theory - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory

One demands infinite information - an unlimited number of measurements - because it has no way of fixing the higher level constraints. The other comes up with elegant and simple formulae by directly modelling those constraints.

The freewill debate has heat mainly because scientists get drawn into defending a strong ontological position - that all causality is local effective cause, Newtonian determinism. But science is really about modelling the world. It might be guided by certain ontological intuitions at times, but these are dispensable.

That is what distinguishes science. It becomes the art of the measurable rather than the defence of the immeasurable (whether that be immaterial souls, or the kinds of material descriptions of nature that would require infinite measurements).

RAuld

I never could understand this type of reasoning!

It must be obvious to you as you go through each day that you take decisions: some based upon thorough reasoning because the consequences are too severe to make a mistake, some based upon intuition (i.e. - past experience manifest from the subconscious), some based upon instinct (i.e. - evolved reactions to certain situations).

Whether your decisions are "meaningful" or "consequential" is, frankly, moot. On a cosmological scale they aint, but to you and your family your actions (i'm sure) are important. To say otherwise is to argue from an objective, abstract rationality rather than the subjective experience of the everyday!

Bill_McEnaney

Guys, have you ever wondered whether determinism would undermine the knowledge(?) we at least seem to get from the natural sciences? Say circumstances, biology, laws of physics and so forth guarantee that I'll always draw the same conclusions when I'm under some set of condition or other. Then it's hard to know why I should trust my judgement any more or any less than I trust yours when you draw the opposite conclusions under exactly the same circumstances. What if deterministic factors guarantee that you'll believe that, say, water consists of H20 when it actually consists of something else instead?

Goodison_Lad

If pure determinism is the way the universe is built then none of us has any choice about what we believe. Decision-making processes where I might weigh up the evidence, form a conclusion and then make the decision are themselves, by definition, determined.

So, if pure determinism operates, it doesn’t really matter whether my conclusion is right or yours is – they were each unavoidable and inevitable.

Only if the laws of nature contain some wiggle room can the notion of truly free choice be entertained – free, in this context, meaning being able to do something other than that which hard determinism dictates.

I don’t think determinism affects one way or another our understanding of the truth of natural law. Some might, deterministically, be compelled to reject certain evidence. Others would equally be compelled to accept it. In a universe that is not wholly deterministic, and real free will existed, some would be inclined to choose not to accept evidence, while others would be inclined to choose to accept it.

Pythagorean

But the "set of conditions" changes with new knowledge. Organisms change their behavior based on new information.

chiro

This means that the systems themselves are implicitly defined rather than explicitly defined.

thinker04

Hi all, new here.

I have a question:

Consider that you were to build a contraption that was as such: A geiger counter that read the decay of an atom from a small radioactive substance, and was hooked up to a machine that flashed a light if it detected decay (Schrodinger's cat thought experiment, but without the cat, box, or poison). Or something similar to this (but for real and based on radioactive decay): http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/e9cb/

Let's also say you make the decision whether to eat breakfast or not in the morning based on if you see the light turn on or not within a 10 second period. If the light turns on within 10 seconds after you start your stopwatch, you eat. If it doesn't, you don't eat.

If radioactive decay is TRULY random, then would your life no longer be "determined" based on actions that could be predicted if all variables were known? Would you still not have "free will", since you would be trading your decision making process from normal deterministic sensory inputs to the random decay of an atom?

If there is some literature on this scenario somewhere, can someone point me in the direction of it please? I couldn't find anything... but don't blame me, it was decided billions of years ago that I would ask this question on this forum before finding anything :D

Whovian

I imagine the argument for free will would be something along the lines of "you chose to determine your actions based upon the outcome of the experiment of your own free will."

Correct; to the best of our knowledge, QM completely ruins determinism, and almost certainly will continue to do so.