Free will and determinism

My interpretation of Paul's question is that he is seeking a procedural/logical/mechanistic explanation of how a free decision can be made.

Yes I think that is his stance. However, when I postulate that we all have a spirit component I don't claim to understand that fully. However, any spirit worth the name would be able to make decisions!

I guess free will would be an attribute of our spirit parts.

David

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

Heh, I can imagine I'd end up the same way as you. I'm quite wary of that LOVE attitude, though I do think love figures into a lot of Survival accounts in some form or another...

edit: I also think if we could 100% choose who we love it wouldn't have the same importance. So not a free will "absolutist" in that sense, I think Meaningfulness requires some aspects of our existence be out of our choice to turn on & off.

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

What choice have we got but to place responsibility for actions on the people who perform them? Even if it's all deterministic, which I doubt, we still need to try to change bad behavior. And so we must identify the bad behavior and the person who performs it.

If you believe that the legal system requires true free will or else everyone should just give up and go home, well then I guess you will chuckle at the idea that it does not.

~~ Paul

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 makes no sense to me. If the decay was "true randomness" there wouldn't be a stochastic half-life.

Seems to me it's obviously neither determined nor random. [In fact I bet if you survey a high number of average people they would agree with me.]

Yes I think that is his stance. However, when I postulate that we all have a spirit component I don't claim to understand that fully. However, any spirit worth the name would be able to make decisions!

I guess free will would be an attribute of our spirit parts.

David

The problem here, it seems to me, is that you're headed to "well, spirit just has libertarian free will by definition." Either that, or spirits don't have libertarian free will, but as long as it's the spirit making the decisions, that's satisfactory.

~~ Paul

This makes no sense to me. If the decay was "true randomness" there wouldn't be a stochastic half-life.

Seems to me it's obviously neither determined nor random. [In fact I bet if you survey a high number of average people they would agree with me.]

There is a pattern in the group, which determines the half-life. But, as far as we know, which particle decays next is truly random.

Now, there could be something going on that we have yet to discover. But that has to be supremely subtle or I think we'd have some evidence for it.

I'm sure we agree that nature has no obligation to make sense.

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

~~ Paul

There is a pattern in the group, which determines the half-life. But, as far as we know, which particle decays next is truly random.

Now, there could be something going on that we have yet to discover. But that has to be supremely subtle or I think we'd have some evidence for it.

I'm sure we agree that nature has no obligation to make sense.

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

~~ Paul

edit: Regarding the bit about random number generation in computers, makes me think of the Von Neumann quote:

"Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of (original) sin."



I can't imagine many laypersons would look at the nature of half-lives and conclude that the individual particles emissions were wholly without any relation to the world.

It's indeterministic, sure, but to say any instance of indeterminism is actually random needs some kind of proof as does the claim there's a randomness/determinism dichotomy that holds for all events. I've not seen the former nor the latter.

I've seen people try to argue that determinism has to be true by way of logical necessity, but this seems to have fallen out of fashion given what we know so far about QM. As Scott Aaarsonson noted, it would be quite odd in the history of science if QM ends up deterministic:

To say I’m not a fan of superdeterminism would be a super-understatement. And yet, nothing I’ve written previously on this blog—about superdeterminism’s gobsmacking lack of explanatory power, or about how trivial it would be to cook up a superdeterministic “mechanism” for, e.g., faster-than-light signaling—none of it seems to have made a dent. It’s all come across as obvious to the majority of physicists and computer scientists who think as I do, and it’s all fallen on deaf ears to superdeterminism’s fans.

So in desperation, let me now try another tack: going meta. It strikes me that no one who saw quantum mechanics as a profound clue about the nature of reality could ever, in a trillion years, think that superdeterminism looked like a promising route forward given our current knowledge. The only way you could think that, it seems to me, is if you saw quantum mechanics as an anti-clue: a red herring, actively misleading us about how the world really is. To be a superdeterminist is to say:

OK, fine, there’s the Bell experiment, which looks like Nature screaming the reality of ‘genuine indeterminism, as predicted by QM,’ louder than you might’ve thought it even logically possible for that to be screamed. But don’t listen to Nature, listen to us! If you just drop what you thought were foundational assumptions of science, we can explain this away! Not explain it, of course, but explain it away. What more could you ask from us?

Here’s my challenge to the superdeterminists: when, in 400 years from Galileo to the present, has such a gambit ever worked? Maxwell’s equations were a clue to special relativity. The Hamiltonian and Lagrangian formulations of classical mechanics were clues to quantum mechanics. When has a great theory in physics ever been grudgingly accommodated by its successor theory in a horrifyingly ad-hoc way, rather than gloriously explained and derived?

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.

I guess I'm the oddball but I don't find this nonsensical at all.

If God = creator of 'everything' (I understand the infinite regress challenge here but bear with me) then I have no cognitive issue with allowing for things to be that seem nonsensical to me.

its not satisfying per se, nor does it do anything for the rational part of me but just like I can't get amped up about Paul's question I don't get amped up about the notion that God somehow has foreknowledge of a free will choice that I might make.

I guess I'm the oddball but I don't find this nonsensical at all.

If God = creator of 'everything' (I understand the infinite regress challenge here but bear with me) then I have no cognitive issue with allowing for things to be that seem nonsensical to me.

its not satisfying per se, nor does it do anything for the rational part of me but just like I can't get amped up about Paul's question I don't get amped up about the notion that God somehow has foreknowledge of a free will choice that I might make.

Well I'm not sure I believe in God so it doesn't bother me in a personal way, just seems contradictory on the face of it.

edit: Regarding the bit about random number generation in computers, makes me think of the Von Neumann quote:

"Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of (original) sin."



I can't imagine many laypersons would look at the nature of half-lives and conclude that the individual particles emissions were wholly without any relation to the world.

It's indeterministic, sure, but to say any instance of indeterminism is actually random needs some kind of proof as does the claim there's a randomness/determinism dichotomy that holds for all events. I've not seen the former nor the latter.

I've seen people try to argue that determinism has to be true by way of logical necessity, but this seems to have fallen out of fashion given what we know so far about QM. As Scott Aaarsonson noted, it would be quite odd in the history of science if QM ends up deterministic:

We agree that software pseudo-random number generators are not truly random. But any computer that needs true random numbers, such as the lottery machines, have true random number I/O devices that generate streams of random bits.

There is a relation to the world for particle decay, in the half-lives of various elements. It involves various per-substance constants (see below). But the decay of a specific particle is unpredictable according to QM. If you buy that QM is indeterministic, then indeterministic particle decay should be no problem. If you think that nothing is indeterministic, then I really want to know where you can put free will.

I'm not sure why we'd put much stock in the "average person's" view of deep reality. Any gut feelings are almost surely wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_decay#Mean_lifetime