If it's not actually possible to simulate a system within the confines of physics, does it being deterministic actually matter outside of thought experiments?

I feel like a random system and a deterministic system which cannot be simulated are effectively the same thing.

It only matters in matters of free will and ethics. One actual scenario where it's relavant would be the discussion around the criminal justice system. If the universe is deterministic, how can punitive justice be justified?

The free will "debate", as most consider it, is an utter joke. A tumor or large amount of kinetic energy to the right parts of your, or anybody else's, brain can turn them into an unredeemable monster.

doesn’t your example make clear the existence and nature of free will?

it’s obvious in its absence

I'd argue that it's not obvious in it's absence, see: the philosophical zombie thought experiment

The secret is that we are all philosophical zombies to begin with.

Recently, I've dealt with behavioral issues with my aging mother brought about by a series of different factors, but most significantly age-related cognitive decline.

Trying to determine if she was acting in a certain way intentionally or unintentionally was fundamentally impossible. In the past, I mistreated her thinking she was choosing to behave in certain ways whenever she really didn't have much of a choice, but then later I realized that to some extent and in some situations, she was. It's an extremely murky line, what decisions were being made due to other influences and what decisions were being made by her, that line never existed to begin with as who her consciousness is fundamentally is determined exclusively by 'outside' influences. Separating her identity as an entity from her material manifestation is likely nonsensical.

It can be justified in a deterministic universe because it makes criminals less likely to commit crime in future.

As a recipient of punitive justice myself, being punished had a tangible effect on how I thought about crime and thus how I behaved post-punishment. Whether you believe that was deterministic or due to my own free will doesn’t change the outcome.

Punishment is not effective for most people in reducing crime. One thing that is effective is increasing the perceived risk of getting caught. People rarely commit crimes when they are sure they will be caught.

For the sake of argument, let's assume that punishment has absolutely no effect on whether someone will commit a crime. Even so, there's still a benefit to imprisonment: it separates criminals from society for a period of time, during which they won't be committing crimes against it.

Sure but separation can be a harsh punishment or a caring and comfortable place. Some countries do the latter and have lower recidivism rates.

Even in the worst case, recidivism rates only reach around 2/3. That means punishment (incarceration) reforms criminals 1/3 the time. When you consider all of the problems with prisons in the U.S., and all of the hurdles offenders have to pass in order to successfully reintegrate into society, it’s quite remarkable that so many manage to do so.

There are plenty of medical interventions, particularly for mental illnesses, that would dream of 1/3 effectiveness. Now consider the fact that recidivism rates are often much lower than 2/3, and in many cases are closer to 1/3. That tells me that punishment actually is quite effective at reducing crime.

Correlation is not causation. If punishment is causing the recidivism then you'd expect an increase in punishment to increase recidivism. It doesn't. You also need to compare prevention with recidivism. Optimal approaches prevent the crime in the first place.

I hear this often but don't see much evidence of it. Do you know of any good studies to support the idea that punishment isn't effective?

To be clearer, it's not that some form of punishment isn't effective. It's that more severe punishment is not more effective. And prevention is the most effective. There are plenty of studies. A search doesn't surface any for you? What search terms have you tried?

I am a firm believer in deterrence, which you seem to be describing. It's a seperate thing from punitive justice which has a focus on retribution. The method is similar but the aim is different (deterrence focuses on making the cost-benefit ratio for crimes very high, while retribution is mainly to satisfy the human need for fairness through punishment).

Is there any real practical difference? Sounds like the only real change is how you frame the ‘punishment’/‘deterrance’

It has a difference because if your goal is deterrence, then if it can be shown that other means of deterrence are better, then it is logical to apply those even if they reduce the apparent punishment, while if your goal is punishment you might want to keep punishing people even if it is shown to not be effective.

See e.g. the debates over lenient prisons in Scandinavia such as Bastøy Prison, where the lenient treatment is seen as justified on a deterrence and recidivism basis but which would be seen as negative if you see the goal of the sentencing to be harsh in order to punish.

The point of punishment is to discourage you (and other people) from doing that action in the future. You don't need free will for that.

If you don't have free will then how would something discourage you from doing something that is already determined you will do? That doesn't make any sense.

Not the commenter you're replying to, and I'm sure you already realise this, but crime/punishment in a fully deterministic universe could be seen as a 'self correction' mechanism of the whole system.

One could imagine an impossibly vast cellular automata system which develops individual cellular 'agents'. Over time the agents develop some means of reproduction/death/reward system and become more and more complex. Then the agents that evolve with cooperative behaviours start to dominate. One might imagine that the system as a whole would also evolve these kind of 'self corrective' behaviours for anti-cooperative behaviours of the individual agents.

This is ignoring the whole philosophical ethics discussion and consciousness of course.

That does ignore a lot of the important factors but it's a useful analogy.

Because the punishment is part of the input that determines what you will do.

In fact, if free will were absolute, punishment wouldn't make any sense because it wouldn't have any effect on your will.

Neither of your claims make sense. If everything is predetermined, you don't need inputs.

If you have absolute free will you are free to disregard or consider inputs.

By that logic, a deterministic computer program wouldn’t need inputs.

What is being claimed by a deterministic world model is that the output (behavior and internal state change) of a human is a pure function of its current state and inputs. Then we try to give inputs that will lead to desired outputs.

The non-compatibilist view of free will is that it is not a pure function, namely that there is a third independent factor, the “free will”, that influences the behavior (and possibly the internal state). If that is the case, there may never be a way to choose inputs that lead to the desired outputs, because the free will could simply void their effect.

You can't try to give inputs that will lead to desired outputs if you have no free will. You can't try to do anything. You just do exactly what you're programed to do.

Even if you can't try, you are still providing inputs, and how you e.g. react to the actions of others will be input to their further actions. That your control over these actions is illusory does not mean the actions themselves do not exist.

If I tell someone not to do something again, then that is an input to their future states whether or not my decision to tell them that was freely chosen or not.

If you go into that situation with the belief that not having free will means that what you do does not matter, and your action as a result is to not tell them, then that will affect their future states too. And so whether or not you have a real, free choice, it is beneficial to act as if free will exist even if you see it as an illusion.

I strongly believe we have no free will. I still get up and work, and try to do as best I can. I believe those choices are not free, but they feel like choices, and they impact my life, so I am happy I act as if they are free.

And so I'll still talk about making choices and trying to do things because of that illusion even though I believe it's all a chain of cause and effect.

I'm choosing to not continue debating with a self-admitted bot.

Thank you for conceding.

I consider the notion of free will absolute utter nonsense, but I still don't agree with this.

Determinism does not mean "irrespective of what else happens, X will happen". It means "because of what else happened, X will happen". You can't say ahead of time that X will happen irrespective whether between now and then something else occurs that might affect the next events, such as actions meant to discourage you. You can only make that determination knowing the full chain of events and the full state.

One of the main argument people use against determinism is this notion that X will happen irrespective of what else happens or what you choose to do. But this is nonsense. You can't say that e.g. whether you keep your job and get fired is already determined, so it makes no difference if you stop going to work. If you stop going work you'll eventually get fired, because your failure to go to work will form part of a chain of cause and effect. Determinism, or even a stochastic universe, without free will just means that you did not have a free choice in the decisions involved. But you still took an action, and that action determined the consequences.

A rejection of free will means we should look differently at the past, because it has moral implications; it does not mean we should stop making the best choices we can going forward, even if we believe those choices are illusory and deterministic.

The point is not that it makes no difference if you stop going to work. The point is that you had no free will in making that decision.

> Making the best choices we can.

You are not making choices.

You understood perfectly well what the last part you quoted meant given the part you cut off. You could put quotes around "choices" to make it clear if you like. The point remains.

As I mentioned in another reply, I agree with that wholeheartedly. That factor of punishment is called deterrence.

I am in favor of punishment for deterrence, denunciation and incapacitation. I am not in favor of punishment for retaliation (punitive justice) or rehabilitation (restorative justice).

Why would you need to justify a punishment that was already predetermined? If you are going to excuse crime with the no free will argument you can excuse the punishers with that argument too.

I'm in favor of punishing crimes. I don't think I have a choice about the matter.

Prisoners don't have free will, nor do judges and police. All is well!

To clarify my position, I do believe in free will; specifically a compatibilistic view of free will. If you read my other replies, you can see that I do advocate for a criminal justice sustem, just not a retributive one (or a restorative one, for that matter).

I do not excuse any crime, nor do I excuse any punishment. Every individual is responsible for their own actions, regardless of the circumstances. However, I see little use in revenge from a legal standpoint. Instead our main motivations should be deterrence and incarceration.

> If the universe is deterministic, how can punitive justice be justified?

Determinism doesn't necessarily mean that organisms always act in the same way. They act in the same way given the exact configuration of them and the world.

Obviously, justice changes the configuration of an organism (fines, prison, ...). To me it boils down to the question whether justice decreases the likelihood to commit crimes again. Given that our systems of justice have evolved over a long time, I'd give them the benefit of the doubt.

Our justice systems have evolved over a long time, and thus include many remnants of earlier times when prevailing values were much different than they are today. I'd be wary about giving them the benefit of the doubt.

If you try to do some semi-random change to large body of code that you don't understand, chances are much higher that you break the system than of you making it significantly better.

The same goes for culture. Most changes tend to have unexpected consequences, and if you try to change everything at once, society tends to collapse.

this is my pet peeve with discussions of ‘free will’ they have an implicit definition—everything being exactly the same at a different time or place—that is non-sensical as far as we know.

I’m still disturbed by peoples confidence in a deterministic universe—I suppose such confidence is based on the success of inductive reasoning but inductive reasoning is a phenomenon based on how our minds work.

As far as I know the philosophical problem of causation is not considered solved?

In any case, elements of randomness seem likely to play a role in human intelligence but what that role is, who knows?

I didn't realize I would need to define the meaning of punitive justice to this crowd, but it's the idea that "the punishment must fit the crime". The idea behind it is to hurt the criminal in order to satisfy the human desire for justice.

The other goals of justice include rehabilitation (re-intgation of the criminal into civil society), deterrence (using the threat of punishment as a means to scare would be criminals), incapacitation (remove dangerous people from society to protect public order), and denunciation (public shaming).

And how is a seeded RNG that an LLM uses any logically different from a deterministic brain? I’m not sure why any of this physics would be relevant to the functional behavior of the brain vs an LLM.

Or the Many Worlds Interpretation is the correct understanding of quantum mechanics. The MWI people will say that indeterminism comes from the Copenhagen idea of there being a random collapse. But since measuring devices and human brains are also quantum systems, there's no reason to propose a collapse. Decoherence would be the reason we only see one result.

Maybe, but there's no data to support one interpretation over another.

I believe that all quantum interpretations are incomplete and therefore wrong. Quantum mechanics is an abstraction over a deeper level of physics we can't measure yet.

Actually, there is a reason to support one interpretation over another. Specifically that it's really hard to define what an "observer" is in the Copenhagen interpretation.

The MW/Everett interpretation is what we have left if we remove the things we cannot define.

There are also reasons to believe other interpretations. For instance, if you're religious, that could pull you towards the Bohr interpretation, since it may make it easier to assume that observation could be linked to an immortal soul.

In any case, it's not natural to assume that below QM there exists a reality that is more similar to our instinctual world model than QM is. If anything, anything below it is likely to be even more abstract and hard to comprehend.

Or it could be that the principles of QM applies all the way down, just as we've seen for the pieces of the SM that we solved after QM was first introduced (strong force, electroweak force).

Objective-collapse theories can actually be experimentally tested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-collapse_theory#Test...

The problem is that any hidden variable resolving quantum indeterminacy would have to be non -local, i.e. able to propagate itself faster than light, which would also violate our understanding of the world quite a bit.

> which would also violate our understanding of the world quite a bit.

Are we discussing science or public relations?

Locality may also be an abstraction.

I find it very intriguing that a "speed of light" emerges automatically in Conway's Game of Life. It's not built into the system, but shows up from the convolutional update rule.

Your comparison with Conway's Game of Life is interesting, since that's inherently local.

More importantly, I'm skeptical towards non-locality because it is an extremely strong assumption with very weak effects: the only place it really shows up is in post-correlations between measurements of previously entangled systems, which notably cannot transfer any information faster than light (in fact, they require classical communication to even be noticed). Moreover, the only way to get entangled systems in the first place is through local interactions.

By believing in non-local hidden variables you get a deterministic universe with a mysterious, otherwise undetectable ether that instantaneously notifies quantum entities that they should update their behavior. By not believing in them, you get rid of the only n on-local "phenomenon" in physics (really, more of an interpretation) but you have to accept that some things are fundamentally random.

Easy choice, if you ask me (or most of the physics community).

It won't be the first time our understanding is flipped upside down if such a framework of thought arises.

Yea I don't disagree, just wanted to point out that the hidden variable would not mean that matter actually behaves like a classical mechanics machine.

In most systems, if you simulate them for sufficiently long, macroscopic behavior depends on quantum effects. For example, if you simulate simple newtonian gravity on three bodies, your numeric precision quickly grows such that you need to know the position of the objects more accurately than Heisenberg allows.

Not necessarily. As you fine grain the simulation enough, eventually you run out of energy in the universe to compute even a second of simulated output.