Free will and determinism

First, radioactive decay is not a random state, only per "particle"!!  There are firm patterns established from data.  That is how they calculate a half-life.  It is random, if one believes that quantum states are weird and each particle is important in a special way.  There is surely old thinking that clings to the metaphysical "true randomness" around.

Indeterminism is an abstraction in philosophy, but is an actual state of affairs in information science and math (see below).  Selections are made in a pragmatic real-world.  Some selections are made by a willful character, that predicts intended outcomes.  Tests can document selections and infer patterns in individuals and groups.  You can freely fail a test.  You usually have to willfully focus and plan practice time for learning 

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questi...tive-decay

I like the quote noting that "random" is simply an external designation about prediction. (Or at least I will choose to read it that way heh)

As William James aptly put it:

What does determinism profess? It professes that those parts of the universe already laid down absolutely appoint and decree what the
other parts shall be. The future has no ambiguous possibilities hidden in its womb; the part we call the present is compatible with only one
totality. Any other future complement than the one fixed from eternity is impossible. The whole is in each and every part, and welds it with
the rest into an absolute unity, an iron block, in which there can be no equivocation or shadow of turning.

Indeterminism, on the contrary, says that the parts have a certain amount of loose play on one another, so that the laying down of one of
them does not necessarily determine what the others shall be. It admits that possibilities may be in excess of actualities, and that things not
yet revealed to our knowledge may really in themselves be ambiguous. Of two alternative futures which we conceive, both may now be really
possible; and the one become impossible only at the very moment when the other excludes it by becoming real itself. Indeterminism thus denies
the world to be one unbending unit of fact. It says there is a certain ultimate pluralism in it.

Chance is a purely negative and relative term, giving us no information about that of which it is predicated, except that it happens to
be disconnected with something else—not controlled, secured, or necessitated by other things in advance of its own actual presence. What I
say is that it tells us nothing about what a thing may be in itself to call it “chance.” All you mean by calling it “chance” is that this is not guaranteed, that it may also fall out otherwise. For the system of other things has no positive hold on the chance-thing. Its origin is in a
certain fashion negative: it escapes, and says, Hands off! coming, when it comes, as a free gift, or not at all.

This negativeness, however, and this opacity of the chance-thing when thus considered ab extra, or from the point of view of previous
things or distant things, do not preclude its having any amount of positiveness and luminosity from within, and at its own place and moment.
All that its chance-character asserts about it is that there is something in it really of its own, something that is not the unconditional property
of the whole. If the whole wants this property, the whole must wait till it can get it, if it be a matter of chance. That the universe may
actually be a sort of joint-stock society of this sort, in which the sharers have both limited liabilities and limited powers, is of course a simple
and conceivable notion.

Computers are simply not deterministic at their basis. They are engineered to give the illusion of being deterministic, because we need them to function as if they are.

This reminds of me an old book on Randomized Algorithms I can't seem to find anymore. I liked the intro because it noted that the reason we would use such algos is b/c they will give us an answer that isn't definite but has a high probability of being correct within an acceptable time frame.

This was contrasted with deterministic algorithms for similar problems that could run for so long that it increased the chance of some error in the substrate the Turing Machine is crafted from. One special case even noted the deterministic algo for a particular problem could run beyond the expected lifetime of the Sun!

It recalls something the philosopher Dupre once said, that given the claims the Universe is like a machine it should be so much easier to construct perfectly reliable machines.

This reminds of me an old book on Randomized Algorithms I can't seem to find anymore. I liked the intro because it noted that the reason we would use such algos is b/c they will give us an answer that has isn't definite but has a high probability of being correct within an acceptable time frame.

High probability of being correct?  In my limited view, that sounds like Thomas Bayes groundbreaking ideas.

  In 2018, the University of Edinburgh opened a £45 million research centre connected to its informatics department named after its alumnus, Bayes

   

This is only a minor point, but I do wish that Helen Steward had been interviewed in a more conventional fashion.

As it was, I felt there was a strange teenage awkwardness to the discussion. Also, it would have been better, I think, if she had the whole screen while she was speaking.

First, radioactive decay is not a random state, only per "particle"!!  There are firm patterns established from data.  That is how they calculate a half-life.  It is random, if one believes that quantum states are weird and each particle is important in a special way.  There is surely old thinking that clings to the metaphysical "true randomness" around.

Indeterminism is an abstraction in philosophy, but is an actual state of affairs in information science and math (see below).  Selections are made in a pragmatic real-world.  Some selections are made by a willful character, that predicts intended outcomes.  Tests can document selections and infer patterns in individuals and groups.  You can freely fail a test.  You usually have to willfully focus and plan practice time for learning 

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questi...tive-decay

Yes, I understand that the true randomness only applies to which particle decays next. The half-life of the collection of particles is stochastic.


~~ Paul

This is only a minor point, but I do wish that Helen Steward had been interviewed in a more conventional fashion.

As it was, I felt there was a strange teenage awkwardness to the discussion. Also, it would have been better, I think, if she had the whole screen while she was speaking.

I probably like her talks, such as this one, more than the interviews:




edit: Transcript of the talk as published paper.

I probably like her talks, such as this one, more than the interviews:




edit: Transcript of the talk as published paper.

Another one:

Libertarianism as a Naturalistic Position

There is a rather thinly-veiled suspicion amongst some compatibilists that libertarians are able to embrace their claims about the nature of the human will only in virtue of a general readiness to suppose that human beings occupy a very special place within the order of nature. This readiness, they imagine, is borne of an assumption that many of those compatibilists eschew – the assumption that the universe is theistic and that an omniscient and benevolent god has provided for human beings to be specially positioned within it. Though the world might conceivably be indeterministic, these compatibilists believe, there is no scientifically acceptable ground for supposing that the indeterminism involved might be of such a kind as to provide for anything like freedom of the will – and they are therefore wary and mistrustful of the libertarian’s willingness to accept that the will itself might be the locus (at least on some occasions) of an indeterministic form of operation. To accept this, without taking oneself to have other grounds for embracing the idea that the powers of human beings need not be rooted in ordinary sorts of physics and metaphysics, seems to them wildly unmotivated; it is therefore inferred that probably, their libertarian opponents do believe themselves to have such other grounds. But I am both a libertarian and an atheist. In this paper, therefore, I defend libertarianism against the charge that it flies in the face of what we know or are justified in believing about the order of nature – and indeed, try to make out the beginnings of a case for the view that libertarianism should, on the contrary, be regarded as the position of choice for those who take their science seriously.

This paper admittedly seems like a summary of some other work(s?), like her 2012 book on the subject. I think perhaps the most controversial bit might be her statement that modern physics aligns more with indeterminism than determinism, so in that light revisting Scientia Salon paper by physicist Marko Vojinovic:

Farewell to determinism

So if Nature is not deterministic, how come that our deterministic theories (like Newton’s laws of motion, or any generalization thereof) actually work so well in practice? If there is no determinism, how come we do not see complete chaos all around us? The answer is rather simple — in some cases chaos theory takes a long time to kick in. More precisely, if we consider a small enough physical system, which interacts with its surroundings weakly enough, and it is located in a small enough region of space, and we are trying to predict its behavior for a short enough future, and our measurements of the state of the system are crude enough to begin with — we might just get lucky, so that the the error bars of our system’s state do not increase drastically before we stop looking. In other words, the apparent determinism of everyday world is an approximation, a mirage, an illusion that can last for a while, before the effects of chaos theory become too big to ignore. There is a parameter in chaos theory that quantifies how much time can pass before the errors of the initial state become substantially large — it is called the Lyapunov time [10]. The pertinent Wikipedia article has a nice table of various Lyapunov times for various physical systems, which should further illuminate the reason why we consider some of our everyday physics as “deterministic.”

Let me summarize. The analysis presented in the article suggests that we have only two choices: (1) accept that Nature is not deterministic, or (2) accept superdeterminism and renounce all knowledge of physics. To each his own, but apparently I happen to be predetermined to choose nondeterminism.

It is a fantastic achievement of human knowledge when it becomes apparent that a set of experiments can conclusively resolve an ontological question. And moreover that the resolution turns out to be in sharp contrast to the intuition of most people. Outside of superconspiracy theories and “brain in a vat”-like scenarios (which can be dismissed as cognitively unstable), experimental results tell us that the world around us is not deterministic.

Such a conclusion, in addition to being fascinating in itself, has a multitude of consequences. For one, it answers the question “Is the whole Universe just one big computer?” with a definite “no.” Also, it opens the door for the compatibility between the laws of physics on one side, and a whole plethora of concepts like free will, strong emergence, qualia, even religion — on the other. But these are all topics for some other articles.

I probably like her talks, such as this one, more than the interviews:




edit: Transcript of the talk as published paper.

Well thanks for that. She certainly sounds more serious in that video, but after about 1/4 of it, by brain went into a loop. Just before that happened I noticed that she said (I think) that you could be a determinist and a Dualist!

David

Well thanks for that. She certainly sounds more serious in that video, but after about 1/4 of it, by brain went into a loop. Just before that happened I noticed that she said (I think) that you could be a determinist and a Dualist!

David

William Lane Craig fits that description, also a variety of people who believe God knows the future before it happens.

I'll admit I find the attempts to have God's foreknowledge reconciled with supposedly genuine free will to be as nonsensical as the materialist who denies free will but talks of responsibility.

Nonsense either way, IMO. [I'd actually give higher marks to the believer of the materialist faith, as they at least aren't trying to justify damnation or karmic reincarnation on top of their contradictory beliefs.]

William Lane Craig fits that description, also a variety of people who believe God knows the future before it happens.

I'll admit I find the attempts to have God's foreknowledge reconciled with supposedly genuine free will to be as nonsensical as the materialist who denies free will but talks of responsibility.

Nonsense either way, IMO. [I'd actually give higher marks to the believer of the materialist faith, as they at least aren't trying to justify damnation or karmic reincarnation on top of their contradictory beliefs.]

I suppose I prefer to think more in terms of some expansion of physics - philosophy can become so vague. If you remember, I put the suggestion that time might have two axes - one for the embodied and a second for the disembodied - to Christian Sundberg, who seemed to like the idea.

BTW, my conversation with him became a bit acrimonious after that because of his obsession with love, love, love!

I tend to think that we are basically spirit even when embodied, and we normally do control our thoughts and our decisions.

Yes about materialists who feel responsibility! I think if the proponents of materialism (inevitably with no free will) pushed harder, they would come out with a really extreme view of reality, where responsibility, honesty, love, hate etc would disappear like free will. Looked that way, materialism is utterly extreme.

David