Determinism discussion

So sorry if there's alredy a thread for this, I couldnt find it. I wanted to get some opinions on the concept of Determinism, as a firm believer myself, it seems to be inescapable and absolute and I believe it's hindering my ability to enjoy life. I personally cannot stop thinking about it, i have researched it a lot in the past 5/6 years, and the most I've been able to find about a "counter proof" comes from Quantum Mechanics, but i can't quite wrap my head around it, it doesn't really "disprove" Determinism. In my mind this universe can only operate in one of 3 ways: 1. Determinism, the universe started with a "seed" and everything that has happened, or will happen is alredy set in stone and only governed by cause and effect, even human behavior, this is quite a grim reality in my opinion, it makes me feel like i have no free will. 2. Causality, there is a degree of determinism (reproducibility in experiments etc.) but there are elements of randomness which make it impossible to know what will happen in the future, this in my opinion is also a grim reality, having something happen by pure chance also takes away the possibility of free will. 3. I don't know of a name for this but in practice it's the idea that we are something like avatars, controlled by higher beings that make us do things (essentially, our mind resides outside of this universe, and does not obey it's laws), i find this theory to be flawed however since the universe in which our mind resides must also obey to some rules, bringing us back to theory 1 and 2. What do you guys think about this?

quantum mechanics doesn't really disprove determinism, you are correct. Personally, I have no problem with it. I think I have free will because I can make decisions for myself. The fact that, on some lower level, these decisions are merely a result of some insanely convoluted causality network, does not seem to me to contradict that. Instead I feel that cause and effect are merely the way the universe works, they are the mechanical action while decisions are the result. I think part of it is that you have to reject the Cartesian mind-body dualism. It is clear to me that my mind is in fact intimately tied with my body as well as sensory inputs, without them I would not exist. Additionally decision-making is hardly ever made by the ego, or even the conscious part of you, and often not even in the brain. When you take this point of view, suddenly it becomes less distressing that you are bound by the laws of nature, because you realize that the "you" in the question "do you have free will" only ever referred to a miniscule portion of you.

>>32167 sorry, I worded this wrong >they are the mechanical action while decisions are the result. should read "they are the mechanical action by which I make decisions"

>>32168 Thank you for the reply, I agree that most of our decisions we do not make consciously and that part of the "dread" that I feel comes from some kind of over emphasys on the importance of the concious self, I believe this comes from my religious but quite liberal upbringing, which tends to focus on such things. Having left behind me many beliefs about higher powers and religion however seems to have left some kind of power vacuum in my subconscious, i'll try to explain it this way: I conciously understand that this is how things are and how to live with this knowledge (to some extent), but my mental foundation seems to have been constructed in such a way that i will never fully believe it, some part of me will always think "surely there must be more to this, i think therefore i am, the chemical reactions in my body do not think, so i must be 'free' from the influence of the physical world, but how?". Maybe it's a case of an inflated ego, or perhaps something else, however i always appreciate other people points of view on the matter and i find it helps me to see I'm not the only one who has these thoughts, physical work also seems to keep these thoughts in check, in case any lainon finds this information useful... In any case i find it somewhat ironic that my life has led me to consciously understand determinism while unconsciously trying to debunk it lol

randomness is the only way "free will" can exist. 2 events are either connected which is determinism or not which is randomness. There is no third option. If you use the avatar idea it doesnt change anything because the player still must adhere to this rule in his own space.

>>32172 How can randomness validate the idea of "free will"?

>>32189 Free will is the ability to choose. Randomness is exactly what enables to take multiple actions.

>>32190 if my actions are the result of randomness, how do I have any more free will?

Causality is one of those things that's a useful enough abstraction to understand the kind of thing we encounter on a day to day basis but for edge cases of scale and complexity it sort of falls apart. Not that you can't reasonably extend the notion of causality to these cases, but it just isn't robust enough to give you any real insight beyond "the things that happen tomorrow are related to the things that happen today". In a sense you've reduced the problem to analyzing Brownian motion instead of white noise, but you can't always go much deeper than that with naive models of causality. Predicting the weather is the archetypal example of this. If we label certain patterns of localized observation "pressure systems" and study how these abstractions interact, we can predict with reasonable accuracy whether or not it will rain tomorrow. However, what if you want to predict the weather months or years from now? How long before you have to start taking into account things like butterfly wings, the fluid dynamics of the sun, or the trajectories of individual atoms? Because the weather system has "unbounded complexity" in the sense that inevitable sampling error blows up exponentially rather than being damped away, it really doesn't take long at all. In some metaphysical sense it isn't unreasonable to think that if we had some infinite "state vector" for the universe we could use it to derive a trajectory arbitrarily far into the future, but such a thing is at the very least inaccessible to us (and it's also not unreasonable to think that such a thing is fundamentally unknowable). Point being, naive models of causality (best summarized as the notion that the future is a well defined function of the present) are just models, not objective truth, so we should be evaluating whether they are useful, not whether they are correct. And when we find the model lacking, we should be asking whether it can be revised to increase its descriptive power or should replaced with something else. For what it's worth, lots of our mathematical models of physical systems are not dependent on causality in any strict sense. The actual issue is that our strategies for testing them, i.e. the scientific method, rely on causality. How do you contruct an experiment where you can't assume that changes in conditions directly map to changes in outcome? It's a very interesting problem. Perhaps resolving it will lead to a new enlightenment era in the sciences.

>>32192 I think your problem here is perspective. If you say said randomness is part of you, it is then you that is making a random choice , if you say its not then its outside of you and thus you see yourself victim of outside influence.

>>32167 >It is clear to me that my mind is in fact intimately tied with my body as well as sensory inputs I think it's interesting to take this one step further. If your mind is the result of the dynamics of voltage potentials in your brain, and these voltage potentials are in turn influenced by your sensory organs, your physiology, the internal chemistry of your body, and ultimately (by following the chain of causality) the entire material universe, then perception is in fact how we experience universal cognition. I really like panpsychism for this reason. In a very real sense you are letting the unfolding precesses of the material universe do some of your thinking for you. Or, put another way, these processes: gravitation, erosion, evolution, fluid turbulence, etc., are just as much a part of your mind as the neurons in your skull.

Randomness is an intrinsic and fundamental part of QM, and can affect things on the macro scale of everyday life. See "Schrodinger's Cat". We do not live in an absolutely clockwork universe. But in the macro world the probabilities of causality working as expected are very very strong, but not perfect. There was an interesting recent article on quantum randomness "jiggling" heavy mirrors at LIGO, a good example of its effect in the real world.

>>32193 Very nicely put scientific point of view, thanks. It is a very interesting way of thinking about Determinism (if it cannot be sufficiently proven and it is not a useful belief to hold, why hold it?). I believe it is impossible, like you said, to proerly predict the future in a perfect sense, doing so would require us to be some sort of Maxwell's demon, looking at the universe from a point of view outside of it (and to be omniscent), this however does not help the fact that "free will" is still not possible, merely so complex that it would be unreasonable to properly define, which I guess it's the reason I created this thread.

I would argue there's an intrinsic belief in determinism. We always act in firm belief people are predictable and thus controllable through our actions. Rules&Regulations make only sense because of large masses acting deterministic. Marketing only works because people are predictable. The noise that is intrinsic in a complex system heavily abstracted vanishes when applied to larger numbers as outliers. >>32196 There are interpretations that say said randomness is just hidden complexity.

>>32196 I actually agree with >>32198 on this one, true randomness in my opinion does not exist, only pseudo-randomness, which our puny brains cannot predict and calculate, but nevertheless is deterministic. Do you by any chance still have a link to the LIGO article? after a bit of searching i was not able to find it.

>>32199 Edit: I think i found what >>32196 was talking about, link below: https://news.mit.edu/2020/quantum-fluctuations-jiggle-objects-0701

>>32195 indeed, although it is useful to consider these things as a matter of scale. My body, more particularly my CNS, is more a part of me than some random thing ten thousand miles away is. >>32196 >Randomness is an intrinsic and fundamental part of QM it's really not. The intrinsic and fundamental part of QM is that it is impossible for any particle to interact with another particle in a perfectly predictable fashion. We use "random variables" to model this, but that doesn't mean the interaction is actually random(i.e., does not depend on initial conditions), it just means it is unpredictable, which is a very different property. Numerous models of QM are completely deterministic, including some of the more popular ones. >See "Schrodinger's Cat" that thought experiment was written up as an example of how the idea of quantum superposition is confusing and doesn't make sense.

>>32199 https://news.mit.edu/2020/quantum-fluctuations-jiggle-objects-0701 https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/news/ligo20200701

>>32201 It really is. True randomness is implied by the most widely accepted interpretation, Copenhagen. Pilot wave and many worlds are fringe interpretations.

>>32197 >if it cannot be sufficiently proven and it is not a useful belief to hold, why hold it? I am making a somewhat stronger claim here. I am arguing that utility is the *only* way to meaningfully evaluate any given model, not merely that we do not currently have the insights needed to use more "objective" criteria. Think about what it would mean to "prove" determinism correct (or otherwise to refute it) scientifically. Lets say you are maxwell's demon. You have the universe in a bottle and can control for all possible influences. Can you construct an experiment to test for determinism without begging the question? Seriously, take a moment to try to come up with something (we can set aside the issue of infinities for the time being, infinitely unlikely outcomes in a space of infinite possibilities can be... counterintuitive, to say the least). The issue here is that if your experiment is of the form "I will set the universe in motion with known starting conditions arbitrarily many times and evaluate whether its trajectory ever differs", you are invoking the assumption of determinism as an intractable part of the experiment itself. You have to assume that your actions (creating and observing universes) will result in the same outcome, because otherwise you can't use differing (or consistent) outcomes as evidence for or against determinism. Truthfully, this is a difficult point to make because our vocabulary lacks terminology to describe situations where this isn't the case, but I hope you at least understand what I'm getting at here. The scientific method is fundamentally inadequate to deal with problems like this. If science is defined as the application of the scientific method, or perhaps more generally as the construction of *predictive* models, then science itself is also inadequate. Personally, I like to think of science as any process which seeks to rigorously systematize our perceptual observations. >this however does not help the fact that "free will" is still not possible, merely so complex that it would be unreasonable to properly define With what I just said in mind, on what basis is free will not a possibility? Try to conceptualize a "test for free will" if you like, but I assume you get the point I'm making. We have defined what is and isn't possible by what is or isn't consistent within the framework of determinism. I want to be very clear: this is not an argument that free will "exists" or that free will is consistent with determinism. Rather, free will as a concept can only be evaluated within an epistemological context, and the choice of which context to use (in other words, which axioms to admit) can not be dictated by empirical observation, because the assumptions that underlie empiricism (in this case, determinism) fundamentally cannot justify themselves. This is the very nature of axioms. So we are back at utility. If you choose to model the universe through an empirical/deterministic lens, then free will is inconsistent with that kind of model. However, the point of my previous reply was that there are compelling reasons to seek out frameworks other than determinism, or to use alongside determinism, for certain classes of problem. And if we're just listing off phenomena that determinism struggles to model in a useful way, certainly the nature of subjectivity and consciousness is at the top of that list. >>32201 >My body, more particularly my CNS, is more a part of me than some random thing ten thousand miles away is. Sure, but there's also a question of magnitude to consider. If we admit all physical processes as a valid form of cognition (I think it would be difficult to argue otherwise, assuming you believe that minds emerge from material interactions), then certainly the cognitive contribution of everything that has ever influenced the firing of neurons in your head is greater than the contribution of the neurons themselves. It's just a matter of definitions and perspective though. There are undeniably many other senses in which cognition is localized. Just depends on what kind of question you're seeking to answer.

>>32201 >The intrinsic and fundamental part of QM is that it is impossible for any particle to interact with another particle in a perfectly predictable fashion. We use "random variables" to model this, but that doesn't mean the interaction is actually random By definition of empiricism, data are all we know. If the data are unpredictable, they're random. >>See "Schrodinger's Cat" >that thought experiment was written up as an example of how the idea of quantum superposition is confusing and doesn't make sense. Schoedinger's Cat posits it's simultaneously alive and dead until you open the box. The box is a device that kills the cat if the state of a quantum sensitive component changes. The fault of the thoughtexperiment is that any interaction with that quantum component would trigger the change. There's no dead and alive cat. There's a cat that dies as soon as a certain quantum event happens. The event has nothing to do with a person observing the system. The term `observation' really just means interaction. It's really a stupid choice of words. The reason that the cat being alive and dead is weird, is because it is weird: it's just a misunderstanding of the situation.

>>32222 Standing outside observing people leaving a building you could perceive whether its a man or woman as randomness but anyone inside could predict who leaves the door. Its not the amount of data gathered that determines whether something is really random.

>>32224 This is a good point that can be expanded to the very definition of truth of correctness, since these are concepts that can be accepted only by observers that have similar status in relation to the the event. It would be silly to argue that an even is deterministic because some kind of observation makes it so. The event of the people exiting the building is both deterministic and random.

>>32224 >Standing outside observing people leaving a building you could perceive whether its a man or woman as randomness but anyone inside could predict who leaves the door. Yeah, because they have the data earlier. >Its not the amount of data gathered that determines whether something is really random. Where did I say anything about the amount of data? All I said was that the data is all there is. You're comparing two datasets to come the conclusion that.. what exactly are you trying to conclude? That one dataset is predictable when you have some other data? That doesn't show that that dataset is predictable.

>>32228 It's more than just same info earlier. If you know someone is going into a meeting you know he wont leave soon. Knowing hidden variables is exactly what makes seeming randomness predictable. The point is whether its random or not is a issue of your approach to the problem and not the data processing itself.

> wanted to get some opinions on the concept of Determinism, as a firm believer myself, it seems to be inescapable and absolute and I believe it's hindering my ability to enjoy life. You will need a mathematically proven QRNG device. look into randonauting and the coincidences with the user's intentions to the result >3. I don't know of a name for this but in practice it's the idea that we are something like avatars, controlled by higher beings that make us do things (essentially, our mind resides outside of this universe, and does not obey it's laws), i find this theory to be flawed however since the universe in which our mind resides must also obey to some rules, bringing us back to theory 1 and 2. This is what our ancestors had been all about. This is why we had Sinology and Astrology which tell how everything can be attributed to the planets. This is why we had things like palmistry where some palm reader can even tell if a person would easily get rich etc., become a teacher or artist by observing the creases of someone's hands and basing it from past palm readings of other palmists. It's literally written over you but doesn't mean you can't rewrite it, I mean someone who's good at reading others or artists can tell if a person is poor by looking at photographs or in person, usually people who do well in life have exhausted "smiling" muscles, you can lookup successful billionaires' photos and they would always all smile to their left side, meanwhile the poor ones or ones hard at life can't even smile properly or haven't been using those smiling muscles, on the other hand criminals had this evil grin muscles exhausted that you could tell they are (or would be one) just by looking at their face. Things like phrenology, looking at the shape of a face determines your future disease like heart diseases for pear-shaped face which means you can then avoid such by reading yourself or having yourself read by a phrenologist, iridologist, palmist. If you wanted to escape determinism maybe it's written all over you that you do want to escape from it or did you write it all over yourself? Well it doesn't really matter, the point is these western/eastern arts were pretty useful in predicting, finance, warfare, etc. and are so underrated. Good thread.

>>32203 >pilot wave and everett interpretations are "fringe" in this paper, 9% of surveyed physicists, eminent in their field, favored the Everett interpretation, and pilot wave is considered as valid as any other by most physicists. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1301.1069.pdf >>32222 >By definition of empiricism, data are all we know. If the data are unpredictable, they're random. Suppose I shuffle a deck of cards and start flipping them over one by one. You may believe that it is truly random which card comes next, after all you are unable to predict them with much accuracy if I shuffled well. However in fact, it is always predetermined which card comes next in the sequence.

>>32165 >this is quite a grim reality in my opinion, it makes me feel like i have no free will. Even if there is randomness, the concept of free will makes no sense. Determinism isnt the problem. How can you explain something beyond randomness, beyond causality, yourself as some sort of "first cause"? It can't be rational

>>32235 I bet you will like this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Freedom_of_the_Will

>>32235 >How can you explain something beyond randomness, beyond causality, yourself as some sort of "first cause" Determinism needs an unmoved mover. I don't see a way around this. It doesn't have to be you... but hey, it could be you. People act like its so obvious that conciousness derives from matter but it's completely unfalsifiable. You can just as easily assume that conciousness or cognition is prior to matter, then free will is perfectly consistent with determinism. Not exactly the most elegant formulation but it gets you there.

>>32241 This is called an emergent feature. A property none of the parts of a system hold but the system as a whole can exhibit. Like a motor that drives a car. No part can move the car on it's own but as a whole they gain a new property. >>32235 I have a simple explanation to this. The common problem here is that people assume the first element has to play according to our physics. It doesn't. You first say everything must come from something so somewhere something must come from nothing and this is true but it also should apply to laws.. Without rules 1 and 0 are equal. Existence can be because its equal to non-existence without rules. It's only in our subspace that rules unfold.

>>32248 the laws of nature aren't rules, they are the way things work. If we find something that definitely does not follow the rules as we know them, it is because we got the rules wrong, not because it "breaks the rules".

>>32249 They are rules in the same manner games have rules dictating how i.e. tetris plays. Physics are just game rules in scope of the game that is our reality. There is no reason to assume they apply globally.

>>32232 >in this paper, 9% of surveyed physicists, eminent in their field, favored the Everett interpretation, Thank you for confirming that "many worlds" is a fringe interpretation. >and pilot wave is considered as valid as any other by most physicists. No, it isn't. >https://arxiv.org/pdf/1301.1069.pdf That's a pre-print repository of papers that haven't been peer-reviewed or accepted for publication in a real scientific journal.

>>32261 >9% is "fringe" okey dokey mate, have it your way >>pilot wave theory is considered valid >nuh uh cool, so you don't have any evidence for that right? Just to make this clear. >That's a pre-print repository of papers that haven't been peer-reviewed or accepted for publication in a real scientific journal. wow, so you know what arxiv is! Good for you. However, this particular paper actually *was* printed in a real scientific journal, "Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics", although I don't know why that would change the validity of the results.

>>32248 >This is called an emergent feature Consciousness? Yes, consciousness is often modeled as an emergent consequence of material systems. I'm saying that its placement as a consequence of matter, not the other way around, requires you to assume it is so (or assume other things that imply it). With the axioms of materialism, emergence is basically a tautology. Without them it's unfalsifiable. >Existence can be because its equal to non-existence without rules. It's only in our subspace that rules unfold. I think you have the right idea, but there are better ways to formulate it imo. You only need a first element because without a first element determinism doesn't work. It's like saying "suppose x is a real number". You can't do anything with real numbers unless your axiomatic context admits them, and you can't do anything with determinism unless you make assumptions that allow it to exist. >>32249 >the laws of nature aren't rules, they are the way things work >it is because we got the rules wrong, not because it "breaks the rules". You are assuming that the universe has laws, in other words that it is deterministic. This is a perfectly fine way to model the universe, but it is no more than that. Insisting that your model has transcendent truth is dogmatic. If you disagree, come up with a way to prove that the universe is deterministic without invoking determinism.

Well it seems to me that the universe indeed does follow a strict set of "rules", though I am unaware of those rules at the quantum level (even then, that we can model them only through probabilities doesn't have to mean they're not in a deterministic matter). Whether there is a sort of ghost in the shell, however, does seem like a discussion left for the religions of the world, like buddhism or the vedas (other religions I know of don't seem to address that problem.) But I honestly don't think much of it. The question of "free will" is stupid anyway, because even if we're spirits in garments of flesh and bone, we're largely defined by our biology, out brain structure, our social context, our upbringing, and possibly other factors. How much does that leave for free will? In any case, it makes sense only with additional information. I like to think I have the illusion of free will, and so I act upon my limited options knowing that ultimately my choice rests on experience. Play a game of Go, you have 361 places to start. Likely you'll choose one of 12 or so. In battle you'll find yourself still with a huge array of choice, but you might choose poor tactics or good ones depending on your experience. The rules of the game are not particularly limiting, unless you want to play outside the edges. As for the ghost, I do think there is more to reality than merely the physical. This may be unpopular opinion, but I am irritated by physical reductionism. We may be atoms bouncing, but how much of what we do every day can be expressed solely in terms of those atoms? Sure as hell the reason you didn't talk to Stacey in high school, you don't think of it in terms of atoms bouncing against each other. The mere fact that I can transfer a pattern of synapses in my gray matter to you wherever you are would be hard to explain in terms of physical reactions alone, even if we can trace the whole set of stimuli from source to destination. I just think it's stupidly narrow minded to think one thing invalidates the rest. One way I like to see this is that the rules of nature set the stage for a plethora of events well beyond the scope of the elements of such nature to happen. People still kill each other for power and passion, and provide us with delightful accounts of such events. And anyway, the emergence of complex patterns to come out of very simple rules (weiqi, Conway's, mathematics) is considered a source of wonder, hardly does anybody give up just because all of it is somehow embedded in the axiom system. tl;dr there is no free will and yet you make choices all the time. Choices that are far from trivial.

>>32266 >You are assuming that the universe has laws, in other words that it is deterministic. This isn't necessarily true, you could have a universe with some kind of transcendental law without determinism. This is in fact what many quantum physicists believe.

>>32270 That's true. When I think of laws I think of "if X is the case then Y" but they don't have to be of that form.

>>32283 something like "if X then there is a 30% chance of Y"

Was it Schopenhauer who said, "A man can do as he will, but he can not will as he will."?

Your theory is interesting, but I propose a much better model, I'm not sure which philosopher spoke about it, but it certainly was of idealistic tradition. When you say that the universe begins as a seed, I agree with you, but that does not mean that there is no human freedom, because although the universe moves in a necessary way, it also moves in an unnecessary way, as we see the same thing that has different powers / possibilities (in the Thomist sense), doing different things, this is not possible in a model where all actions are necessary, because there would also have to be a necessary reason for the thing to realize one of its powers / possibilities and not the others . You can accept a kind of determinism, which means that there are necessary actions in the universe, but it does not mean that all actions are necessary, because reality itself, natural / physical and metaphysical, allows a "gap" where things go to path A or path B. Is it clear?

>>32324 Hi, i think I understand what you're trying to say. Maybe because i'm not familiar with the particular branch of Philosophy however i cannot fully grasp this "necessary reason", is it something like "the universe exists for the purpose of X" or "humans are on this world to do x"? I'll look into Thomism to try and understand the point of view! Just like >>32204 said I think Idealism takes the free will into account as a prerequisite, and so it does not try to "prove it" (I may be mistaken, since i'm not well versed in Idealism and I only have a surface level understanding mostly derived by Kant), so it goes back to being a choice of usefulness. Thanks for the reply!

Logic is nice and everything, but the final arbiter of reality is the real, physical universe as far as it's accessible through the physical senses. That's why science has been so successful, and why mathematicians, philosophers, and other religionists can only trail in its wake.

>>32367 >math is a religion but not science weak trolling

>>32367 >he real, physical universe as far as it's accessible through the physical senses So not at all? Even scientists don't think they're measuring the "real" universe unmediated by the mind's projections. You're a science enthusiast mate.

>>32367 >>32367 >science deals with reality If only I had known better, I would have already ditched all the models trying to explain as closely as possible the phenomena I'm studying... I don't even think you're trolling, you're just ignorant, and there's nothing wrong with that if you want to reach a more true understanding.

>>32367 Religion, Philosophy, Mathematics, are all sciences. Science is pursuit of knowledge. Contemporarily, empirical science is `the' science, hence why many seem object to that sentence. These sciences have merits: Philosophy: the ultimate prime---eternal frontier: always just beyond what we know how to know; we effete snobs invented Science---that knowing, now, is your job. Mathematics: true unto itself. But no truth in mathematics beyond beauty---accord in mind mathematician's. (Of religion, beyond my purview, I'll leave description to better-qualified amateurs.) And Science---empirical---has only what one experiences (and fictions thereof)