Note though that in metaphysics/theory of mind determinism is defined as the state at a given moment being necessitated from the state at a previous moment. I think one could critique your argument by saying that you're just pushing back the question of determinism by one level (i.e. "what's responsible for your preference of apples in the first place?"). The fact that you always choose the same way can then be taken to be a proof of determinism instead.
A compatibilist line of argument for your position might go something like this: What we consider a free will would hardly be met by a will completely detached from any deterministic constraints whatsoever. If a necessary condition for free will was that it is free from any external conditions, what would there even be for it to 'choose', and on what basis could its choices be made? Only if your mind knows of apples and oranges (objects subject to deterministic systems) and can interact with them (is at least partly part of the same system) can it make a meaningful choice between them. (Again, this view is based on the assumption that determinism exists and that free will is possible.)
Isn't the concept of free will somewhat of a mysticist mental pleaser that it'll be the thing that save us in the end in doomsday scenarios? If we accept that the world is deterministic and so are our minds and behaviors, that will be quite depressing, and if we assume free will and our souls are real, that means decisions we make comes from trekky super-reality and therefore potentially infallible, which happy.
> Note though that in metaphysics/theory of mind determinism is defined as the state at a given moment being necessitated from the state at a previous moment. I think one could critique your argument by saying that you're just pushing back the question of determinism by one level
I think this is just tangential to free will. If a state_old -> state_new transition() was deterministic code, but code involved RNG sampling, it can be considered both deterministic and not. It cannot be ruled one way or another here.
> What we consider a free will would hardly be met by a will completely detached from any deterministic constraints whatsoever. If a necessary condition for free will was that it is free from any external conditions, what would there even be for it to 'choose', and on what basis could its choices be made?
This part looks like a strawman sandcastle made up to overload opponents. A lot has to be defined in your favor for that argument to work. What's wrong with rolling a dice(assuming it still works)? Is randomness make a choice laughable meaningless non-choice?
I'm starting to understand why "technically inclined people are non-compatibilist", everything is just way too under-defined that people are barely on same pages.
In other words a deterministic universe is actually completely consistent with our experience once you realize that the mechanism of us “choosing” anything is really an illusion.
Highly recommend it.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/making-sense-with-sam-...
What you ate for breakfast January 3, 2024 could be what you always eat with those memories, that body, those resources etc. So saying yes once could very well mean you would say yes 100% in exactly that context without meaning you would always say yes in similar but not identical situations.
On the other hand if it’s random in identical contexts then it’s just random not free will.
Defining free will: Compatibilists often define an instance of "free will" as one in which the agent had the freedom to act according to their own motivation. That is, the agent was not coerced or restrained. Arthur Schopenhauer famously said: "Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills."[14] In other words, although an agent may often be free to act according to a motive, the nature of that motive is determined. This definition of free will does not rely on the truth or falsity of causal determinism.[2] This view also makes free will close to autonomy, the ability to live according to one's own rules, as opposed to being submitted to external domination. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism
I guess it is technically true that they would be okay if it turned out determinism was false, since their argument is that determinism and free will CAN be true at the same time. Their line of argument is only really worthwhilein the first place if you believe it plausible that causal determinism holds. And I think most of them do (maybe it's telling that the position is also sometimes called 'soft determinism'). If they denied determinism from the outset, they'd probably be in the 'libertarianist' camp instead (not to be confused with political libertarianism).
The 'tree' of positions relating to determinism & free will is roughly: Do you believe determinism and free will to be mutually exclusive? If no: you're a compatibilist. If yes: you're an incompatibilist. -> In which case: do you believe determinism to be true OR do you believe free will to exist? You believe determinism is true: you are skeptical about free will, to you free will is an illusion. You believe free will to exist: You're a libertarianist and believe complete determinism not to be true.
Although often much lengthier and more technical than Wikipedia, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has very well-vetted entries on philosophical topics, where the authors all are scholars in the respective topic and are asked to write introductory entries (potential downsides: English only and not always completely novice-friendly). There is one on compatibilism, too https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/
A quote from it: "Other compatibilists show less concern in rebutting the conclusion that the freedom to do otherwise is incompatible with determinism. Compatibilists of this stripe reject the idea that such freedom is necessary for meaningful forms of free will (e.g., Frankfurt 1969, 1971; Watson 1975, Dennett 1984)—the “varieties of free will worth wanting,” (Dennett 1984). And even more notably, some compatibilists simply deny that freedom of this sort is in any way connected to morally responsible agency (e.g., Fischer 1994, Fischer & Ravizza 1998, Scanlon 1998, Wallace 1994, Sartorio 2016)."
This is the position of the paper above essentially. It references Dennett. The kind of freedom that matters, and that ppl are talking about in everyday life, is not the type of freedom incompatibilists reject. It still makes sense to talk about freedom, as in "freedom of opinion" etc, even if agents could not have chosen differently.
The paper explains this position from the perspective of reinforcement learning, and also gives a theory for why it is beneficial for intelligent agents to model themselves as being able to have chosen differently even if they actually could not.
In my mind, that the known laws of nature do not permit "free will" in the way incompatibilists define it is trivial. (regardless of whether the universe is truly deterministic or also has some randomness sprinkled on top)
Yep, philosophic aspect of the article one big facepalm.
Free will as its commonly understood is an entirely religious concept and has little/no utility in explaining behavior. It is, IMO entirely unrelated to consciousness and a distracting subject that traps people into circular reasoning.
The interesting question is what are the myriad factors that contribute to the state of a system at a specific time. From hormones to shoe color to genes to what you ate for breakfast to how you were raised.
Like I said before the more interesting questions are about the interaction of a system with the rest of the world such as what brought the system to a state that it makes a certain choice, what are the dynamics of that state, how might that state change based on different stimuli, can we nail down what exactly is going on in all the relevant parts of the system at a given time etc and if not how close can we get.
I do wish the ever increasing stigma around it in serious conversations would hurry up and increase so we could stop wasting our time with it though ;)
If it's the will itself, that's circular, and sounds like a feedback loop. If it's something else, great...tell me about it. And how it's free.
See: Bell's theorem.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem
It appears to be completely random.
Hidden variable theory is what you were describing initially. It basically says that there must secretly be deterministic rules to quantum mechanics, and that the randomness we observe is just due to our ignorance of some "hidden variables". Einstein was a fan if this theory because he believed "God doesn't play dice".
John Stewart Bell discovered that quantum mechanics would actually behave a little bit differently if there were secretly variables out there, and proposed experiments that would show if there were hidden variables or not.
The 2022 nobel prize was awarded because these experiments were finally completed, and they showed conclusively that there were no hidden variables in quantum mechanics.
>local
That's an important modifier.
>The 2022 nobel prize was awarded because these experiments were finally completed, and they showed conclusively that there were no hidden variables in quantum mechanics.
Nah, from the same article:
"The exact nature of the assumptions required to prove a Bell-type constraint on correlations has been debated by physicists and by philosophers. While the significance of Bell's theorem is not in doubt, its full implications for the interpretation of quantum mechanics remain unresolved."
1) If we allow information to be non-local, i.e. we allow information to travel instananeously. Allowing this would just be such a hit to the foundation of theories like relativity and quantum field theory that most physicists don't really believe this could be an explanation. These theories rely on nothing traveling faster than the speed of light.
2) We could allow for "superdeterminism". One of the assumptions of Bell's theorem is that a researcher is free to choose any measurement they'd like, independent of the particle they're measuring. However, if the universe correlated everything from the Big Bang onward, a.k.a "superdeterminism", then the researcher is actually NOT capable of choosing a measurement independently of the particle. Everything is pre-scripted from the initial conditions of the Big Bang. If I go and measure a photon from the CMB (the earliest light in the universe we can measure), superdeterminism implies that this photon emitted 14 billion years ago somehow "knows" exactly how it'll be measured in 14 billion years, and has hidden variables that ensure it won't contridict my measurements or quantum theory. This seems to open a whole can of worms about the feasabilty of all scientific experiments, and it doesn't actually make any predictions about the randomness anyhow.
Out of curiosity I went digging to see if there were hard numbers for what physicists believe, and I found a 2011 poll from a conference about the nature of quantum mechanics. Surprisingly none of the respondents believed that random quantum events have some sort of underlying determinism. I'm not saying you should always follow the crowd, but it, combined with all the laboratory testing of the Bell inequality, shows that your initial statement "randomness is an incorrect interpretation of quantum mechanics" is not something you'd say to a group of physicists without having very compelling and detailed reasons to back it up, because it's very much a fringe idea. The majority of physicists subscribe to theories of quantum mechanics that don't involve hidden variables, and treat the randomness as inherent to theory.
Link to the poll if you're interested: arxiv.org/abs/1301.1069. I'm talking about question 1.
They actually ask later in the poll which interpretation is their favorite (Q12) and 42% pick Copenhagen. But the only deterministic one on that list is the pilot wave theory, and that got a 0. Some did pick "other", so that might include something deterministic, but based on the results of Q1 I'm assuming not.
It doesn't tell you there are hidden variables involved or not. Whether light travels fast or not. Whether there's determinism or random chance involved. It's only an if clause, if you may; but a very important one, I'm not detracting from it. Please take time to understand that.
>These theories rely on nothing traveling faster than the speed of light.
There's a lot of phenomena that could be perceived as "faster than light" (i.e. a shadow's projection) and yet they aren't. Information should also not travel faster than light, that put an end to many entanglement paradoxes out there that seemed to imply faster than light travel from a first glance.
If a hidden variable is involved, there could be a not-yet-understood part of the system that allows for it to work in spite of this apparent non-locality.
Does the Bell theorem tell us that? No. Do I know the answer to that? No. Do you know the answer to that? No. No one knows. Hence why I wrote, yesterday,
>A deterministic process being behind it cannot be ruled out (yet?).
> actual participants that determine the outcome.
Nobody disputes that we are (well, almost nobody). But we as participants are ourselves an outcome of processes that are somehow determined, and our decisions have causes. And assuming that they’re instead random doesn’t improve the situation.
A purely deterministic mind is a movie. You watch it. There's no way to influence the outcome or it wouldn't be deterministic. You're just a long for the ride.
A non deterministic mind could be nothing more than randomness with no ability to influence outcomes still which makes it little different to a movie. Again you're just a long for the ride even if the ride has random events.
But non deterministic and the ability to actually influence outcomes? That's the intuition I suspect most people have for free will right there.
That alone alone doesn't give determinism though. For that we still need to have some influence on the outcomes of quantum events. If there's a mechanism by which we can will for some quantum outcomes to be more likely than others that'd be nice. It'd fit with intuition that we aren't just observers of a series of events but actual participants that determine the outcome.