Free will re-redux

I'm not sure I'd call it a relation between the events. It's just a property of the particles from which a half life trivially emerges. But, yes, something is required to make it so particles don't decay entirely arbitrarily.

I don't know if it's trivial or not, I just mean something about Uranium-238 makes its half-life 4.5 [b]illion year[s] by exerting some control over the indeterministic decay.

The same for the other half-lives.

Or each flip is just truly random with respect to the other flips. I think you would need contingent causation to make the flips come out something other than 50/50. Coin flips are different from particle decay, no?

I think true randomness would mean there is no distribution that holds over time, but we could make coin have a 75% Tails, 25% Heads distribution.

I'll look around. My guess is that I won't find anything, which is why I remain skeptical. I'm not sure how a compelling argument for free will can be formed without some explanation of how the decision arises from the presumably indeterministic sources of decision-making.

there are mental precursors => a decision is required => poof! => a decision is reached


~~ Paul

You're asking for the mechanism of something that is fundamentally not mechanical. If it could be explained mechanistically, then it wouldn't be free-will.

Is the Will responsible for Determinism and Randomness, or are all three extant at the Ground of Being?

I think of it as though Will is the force that converges the boundaries into tighter more complex structures and the residual structures are what we think of as determinism. The space between boundaries is filled with randomness which is Will that has not been developed or shaped. It is potential Will.

All structures we see around us are the result of Will. And though they may appear solid and immutable, there is always a fuzzy boundary around them in which randomness presently prevails and in which we may drive a wedge to insert our own Will to destroy and create new structures.

After all if God is the Ground of Being, then isn't God's Will what makes some non-conscious events determined or random?

I suppose.

IIRC

It's hard for me to remember what I said yesterday and I'm not going to go back and re-read this long thread!

we said Determinism was the pole of Fate/Necessity and Randomness was the pole of Hyper-Chaos, the latter describing how anything can happen including a universe that's deterministic for a billion years but then allows for quantum stochasticity again.

That doesn't sound familiar, but doesn't mean I didn't agree to it!

A universe that's deterministic for a billion years can be thought of as the loading of a scenario or the painting of a set. It didn't actually happen, it is just placed there. The only way things "happen" is if there is the interplay between the will and the chaos because that is consciousness. Without consciousness, it is computable and if it is computable it is compressible so then the billion years of determinism is a blink of God's eye.

So arguably there's really just Hyper-Chaos and Will, since Determinism is indistinguishable from Hyper-Chaos unless something is ensuring that only possible Future arises from the Present...but if there is such a thing it seems it would have to be Will?

I think it is impossible to think of these in any other way than as the triad. You say determinism is indistinguishable from hyper-chaos, but I'd say pure Will is indistinguishable from hyper-chaos because the only way Will can complexify into structures like we see is if it is frustrated which means something is determined. It is the time-lag or the frustration between Will and fulfillment of will that creates order and structure and determinism. Everything you see is a product of God's (and by extension yours and mine) frustration.

But as you said "really just Hyper-Chaos and Will" I was brought back to Genesis again... "And the Spirit of God brooded over the Waters"... which to me symbolizes Will and Chaos. The Spirit is the animating force of Will and the Waters symbolize the Abyss of Hyper-Chaos.

Can you describe the "goal oriented feedback loop" some more.

Well in Mechatronix class in college we built Lego robots that had a cruise control - a simple PID loop. PID loops were the simplest control system. There was all this weird math and Laplace transforms that I never fully grokked, but anyway, there are some complex algorithms behind control systems...

But we don't need all that weird math for philosophy... the gist of it is that you have a target value and a changing environment (a forcing function) and you sample data from the output and run it back through an algorithm that uses the weird math to adjust the input.

Whatever consciousness may be, feedback loops are certainly a major component. The OODA loop isn't just for fighter pilots.

What we want depends on our orientation to our environment and our environment is always changing and what we want changes as well. This is part of the computational irreducibility. We don't know what we want and when we figure out out we can't have it (for a while) and when we get it, it disappoints and we want something else. This is the dynamo of creation. God is frustrated because he hasn't attained his goal yet because his goal is changing as he changes. This is a scalable facet of reality.

So we have our goals and we form organizations and polities to work together to achieve them. One level down the scale and we find our cells grouping together to do the same... one level up the scale and what do we find? Souls? Soul groups?

What is the purpose of a life-review? So you can feel good or bad about stuff you did and that's it? I think not. What is the use of feedback if you never have the benefit of using it to improve? The feedback can adjust the algorithm stored in your "soul" to better handle the forcing functions of the environment for the next attempt at attaining the goal(s).

So it's Determinism, Will/Perception, Randomness?

Yes I think of Will/Perception as skating along the boundary and harvesting from the randomness and excreting structure/determinism which in turn frustrates another Will which prompts it to dive into the randomness to excrete its own structure, and so it goes on and on complexifying with every iteration.

And with every iteration the boundary between structures becomes thinner and less fuzzy leaving less space for randomness (imagine initially close packed spheres transforming into honeycomb and then even more complex patterns), but this is balanced out by the surface area of the boundaries increasing because with the complexity comes more boundaries... think shoreline fractal.

This process of thinning out boundaries yet increasing their surface area is the convergence that causes quantum probabilities to converge into actualities. The convergence is truncated after it has reached the point of being useful or involved in the attainment of the goal of some Will.

Where it is helpful to think of poles IMO is it helps see how bizarre it would be to think of quantum indeterminism as true randomness, since the latter would at the least mean that probabilities aren't measurable. As Thomas Nail notes, we can see that quantum indeterminism does maintain some relation to the time/space context - for example if I throw a ball every electron's positional probabilities shift along the arc of the ball's trajectory.

And since the classical lies atop the quantum, we only have an "adequate determinism" which only further suggests all causation is dispositional rather than necessary. This means the behavior of reality more and more aligns with the idea of a mind, maybe the Mind...

Will reply on the other stuff in a bit.

Agreed.

Continuation from above ->


Interesting sync - have you read Stephen King. All his books are part of a shared universe, and in that universe Gan is the word for "God". Gan arises from "Prim", the abyss of primordial chaos, and manifests as the Dark Tower which is the Nexus of Worlds.

Wow that's cool! I have not read his books but I probably should.

So you think reality is at least partially generated by two neural networks competing in a game? I think it's that part that I get confused about. Who made the two NNs, are they gods or literally programs?

Just like the arms race between two superpowers leads to more complex tech and a more complex game, the same is true (I think) with the structure of reality.

I think there's more than two "neural networks" competing, but their power tends to aggregate like so many other things in nature along a pareto distribution and so we have Jesus and the Devil so to speak...

Like I said in the post before this one, the process of creation is this: Will dives into the Chaos and excretes order which then determines something which frustrates another Will prompting it to dive into the Chaos to achieve its goal and so on...

Exactly how the whole thing gets going from square one? I don't know. Maybe there's no beginning and no end... wherever you are, you're always in the middle.

Aside from the "adversarial" aspect of GANs, I think they are also an important analogical tool in our philosophical toolkit because they help us imagine how Plato's realm of forms could work... You can input a symbol or a word and get back a complex indeterministic unique instantiation of that symbol or word.

I think this is crucial for beginning to understand things like synchronicities and other mystical phenomena where there is not a physical local mechanistic causal link, but there is a semantic link. If reality is created by something like a GAN then the manifestation physically of something complex can be accomplished simply with a word... and this is essentially Magic... direct imposition of Will without any physical mechanism... the materialists say this is impossible because there must be a causal chain, but what was the causal chain that led to my computer's GAN generating an image of a cat when I ask for a "CAT"? It is not seen physically, but running in the background is a network that can generate anything you wish if you ask for it... albeit with some randomness in the outcome which will inevitably lead to frustration. ;-)

So do we repeat versions of our lives, some decisions remaining the same and others being open to Will again?

I don't know... maybe? Or maybe improvements we make in our Soul from this life help us better achieve our soul goals in a similar though not exactly the same environment?

Upscaled?

Yes, like taking a low-res compressed image and using a neural network to generate new information that is probably close to what the original would have contained... close enough to serve the same purpose as the original.

You're asking for the mechanism of something that is fundamentally not mechanical. If it could be explained mechanistically, then it wouldn't be free-will.

But then why should I believe in it, if there is not only no description possible but also no evidence? In fact, if no description if possible, I daresay no evidence is possible, either.

Is it not possible to come up with a nonmechanical description of what happens between the final moment of indecision and the first moment of decision?

~~ Paul

But then why should I believe in it, if there is not only no description possible but also no evidence? In fact, if no description if possible, I daresay no evidence is possible, either.

Is it not possible to come up with a nonmechanical description of what happens between the final moment of indecision and the first moment of decision?

~~ Paul

Happy New Year Paul -

I don't think you replied to my last post where I argued quantum indeterminism, specifically radioactive decay, is neither determined nor random.

Happy New Year Paul -

I don't think you replied to my last post where I argued quantum indeterminism, specifically radioactive decay, is neither determined nor random.

I'm not sure which post you're referring to. Decay is a stochastic process. I don't think I'm willing to go any further than that, with some sort of philosophical hypothesis about what that means for determinism/randomness.

Note that the half-life of a particular isotope is not random with respect to other isotopes. The more unstable the isotope's nucleus, the shorter the half-life. Of course, one could argue that this is a tautology, if stability is defined in terms of half-life. But I think it's usually a function of the ratio of protons to neutrons.
 
We can also change the half-life of an isotope by tearing off some or all of its electrons.

~~ Paul

I'm not sure which post you're referring to. Decay is a stochastic process. I don't think I'm willing to go any further than that, with some sort of philosophical hypothesis about what that means for determinism/randomness.

Note that the half-life of a particular isotope is not random with respect to other isotopes. The more unstable the isotope's nucleus, the shorter the half-life. Of course, one could argue that this is a tautology, if stability is defined in terms of half-life. But I think it's usually a function of the ratio of protons to neutrons.
 
We can also change the half-life of an isotope by tearing off some or all of its electrons.

~~ Paul

[My last post above.]

It seems to me that everything you're talking about here shows that while the particle emission aspect of decay is not determined, the fact the half-lives can be compared & manipulated in the way you mention speaks to the continued [r]elation between the indeterministic event (particle emission) and the precusors (the stuff you mention in your post).

So there is a causal relation but it remains un-determined. I don't think there's any complicated philosophy here, rather just observation of the process and noting different isotopes have different calculable half-lives.

Honestly I think the idea that decay is a Random process, as in there's no causal relation between the precursors and the "random" emission event, is based on a philosophical insistence of a dichotomy that whenever there's a causal relation there's  determinism.

IMO if you gave a lecture on radioactive decay to physics students who had never heard an argument for everything being exclusively random/determined, and simply said the process was neither you wouldn't get any objections.

I certainly never knew of this claim of dichotomy until I heard it as a philosophical argument. No one teaching the STEM courses I took ever mentioned things must be exclusively random or determined.

But then why should I believe in it, if there is not only no description possible but also no evidence? In fact, if no description if possible, I daresay no evidence is possible, either.

Is it not possible to come up with a nonmechanical description of what happens between the final moment of indecision and the first moment of decision?

~~ Paul

You should believe in it if you believe new things happen.