On Determinism and Free Will

Well we all want to learn here don't we? :)

The article was about time, but the last paragraph of page 357 and a bit of page 358 talk about what the future being fixed may or may not imply about free will.

http://www.kristiemiller.net/KristieMiller2/Papers_files/21%20Miller.pdf

Thanks, I just skim-read the article.

In the section you mention, s/he is arguing from a compatibilist position, that even if determinism is true, choice would still impact on the future. Imo this is incoherent. However, it isn't absolutely clear whether this is a nominal position that's being discussed or the author's position.

Since the author doesn't support this position by means of any argument, there is nothing to refute. It's merely an assertion.

Earlier, s/he writes:

<<if determinism is false – if the laws of natureare chancy or probabilistic – then when we combine them with the particular mattersof fact at a time they will not uniquely determine the way the world was, (or will be)at every other time.Instead there will be a range of possible past states>>

Here, s/he is referring to the "branching causality" that I mentioned.

Incidentally, I think this associate professor of the university of Sydney, whatever that means, is wrong when she claims she's discussing ontology. Like the friend she lives with, who wants to promote the properties of bounciness and sphericality, she is a bit floaty herself. She's interested in presentism, eternalism and something else to do with blockages. These, of course, are incomplete or incorrect world views and so the lady is discussing epistemology, or trying to.

It's not incoherent. There is nothing wrong with saying the future would be different without saying that it will be different.

Do you mean that it would be different if something happened that would be impossible if we accept the conditions that govern the thought experiment to be delineated by determinism, which holds that every state of the universe is exactly determined by prior states, and which is the subject of this thought experiment?

I am saying that it is incoherent according to the accepted criteria when we state and accept that:

1) Determinism is the case
2) "Determinism" holds that all states of the universe are necessarily and inescapably the result of past cases
3) Free will is the case
4) "Free will" holds that humans can have genuine choice wherein  wecircumvent determinism and cause indeterminable outcomes, according to the choices we make.

We have the situation where the future is both determined and not determined. This isn't a paradox but it is incoherent, like having a rabbit that isn't a rabbit. Do you see what I mean? You have to be logical or your ideas are meaningless in any case.

Your definition of free will is essentially that determinism is false (you even use "determinable" and other such words in the definition). So I can't argue with you with that definition. But I and others think that when we say we are free to choose something, we just mean that we can look at two or more choices, and whichever one we truly want, we can act on. Even if particles made me choose x, it's still the case that I wanted x and I got x, and that, had I wanted y, I would have gotten y. It seems like our will is recognized by it always being met (and so I'd be tempted to also call it free), yet it's theoretically predictable by an outside observer.

Maybe I'm fuzzy on determinism, but just because it says one set of events that governs the actual world is necessarily the case, doesn't mean it's incoherent or pointless to talk about different worlds. It just means that those different worlds with alternate histories wouldn't be ones that actually occur; but we still know what it means for them to occur or not. And naturally, inquiring about what someone would have done under x circumstances can be useful info, even if it just tells us something about their personality.

I sort of talked about this before, but to me it seems difficult to describe any sort of nature without determinism. I mean you can say "probabalistic" to make it sound nice but what is that even saying, I'm 50% me and 50% not me or something? lol. I mean if you were a god and wanted to make a non-deterministic world how would you do it? If you wanted to make a person who "could" do x or y what would you do differently compared to a person who could only do y because he wanted to do y (determinism/compatibilism)? I don't even know how you could describe it, because for us even to know what you're talking about you have to talk about something defined, yet how is that not determined by some sort of criteria?

<<It's not incoherent. There is nothing wrong with saying the future would be different without saying that it will be different.>>

Another way of putting it is that "would" is a conditional, which is therefore conditional on an event. That event must be possible or the conditions could never prevail for it to take effect. Therefore there must logically be a possibility that it *will be different* and if such a possibility is non-existent then the conditional "would" is meaningless or nonexistent.

If a then b.
not-a doesn't cause any statement about b.
a causes the statement b.

This can be applied in various ways but perhaps the most simple is to have (a = choice), in which case (b = possible difference) is implied, whereas if choice does not exist, no statement concerning difference is implied. However, when (a = determinism), not-a produces exactly the same result.

This is a long-winded way of explaining that accurate models of the real world cannot be extrapolated from ideals. Since determinism is an ideal (a model we invent in our minds rather than a model that can be shown to have a basis in the universe), it has no connection with real models of events.

Therefore it's meaningless.

I don't know, maybe we're not using the world "possible" in the same way. If a coin has heads on both sides is it possible to get tails? I mean, I guess it depends on how you're using the term possible? It can't happen in this actual world, but I suppose we could imagine what it would be like if the coin did have a tails side, although obviously you'd have to change how the world was in that scenario.

But even a person freely choosing what they want will have one single scenario, and one "possible" scenario that is nonetheless inconsistent with that person's wishes (and so arguably has no place in the "real world"). And we can explain, maybe even that person can explain, why the choice he didn't pick doesn't belong in this world -- maybe he doesn't think it's interesting. Any world in which a person freely chooses and wants to only pick something interesting is not going to be consistent with a world in which he also chooses that uninteresting thing. Precisely because that's what his will dictated. If this "possibility" remained it almost seems like that would make the dude less free, because he just can't get rid of it even though he wants nothing to do with it.

<<I mean if you were a god and wanted to make a non-deterministic world how would you do it>>

I would cause people to have minds which were semi-isolated from the world in the same manner that a zener diode works. That is, if the mind operates according to stimuli that are below the threshhold of any incoming signals, then the mind becomes capable of forming a model of the world which is effectively isolated from it, except when incoming signals overcome the threshold resistance. I think this is probably how the mind really does operate, since I can't think of any other mechanism. So what we have is a feedback loop which is essentially existentialistic and consists of sense-impressions of our own thoughts and sensations, isolated from incoming signals. We are, essentially, multi-minded.

We are not discussing God or religion, Mottley

"there must logically be a possibility that it *will be different*"

Yeah, in a possible world. In world B, a theoretical world different from ours, it would make sense to say certain things "will happen" that won't happen in our world.

Elubas, I'm really tired, I've driven 700 miles in the past few days and it's after 4 am. I really appreciate your input and this conversation with you but I'm not capable of giving of my best atm.

How is this non-deterministic exactly?

I have a sneaking feeling that you're an ideological determinist, who extrapolates the idea of linear causality and believes that it can be applied to the universe. It isn't realistic. It's trying to make the universe come out in reality like a simple pattern in your mind. It is naive and simplistic. Many people think like that. That is because people tend to think over-simplistically. This means that the models they work by are incorrect. We know this because we know that mankind makes a lot of mistakes in practice. Therefore something is wrong with our thinking.

Anyway, you're trying to make me do all the work and I've already explained that I'm tired. Try to get away from your chess-player mentality and try to relate to human beings for a change.

I'm not making you do anything. If you want to get back later, get back later lol. I do understand your general sentiment though. There are a lot of ways in which we try to have the world conform to our concepts when really we should be trying to conform/allign our concepts with the world. Beginnings and ends, for example. Maybe it doesn't make sense for us to take our term "beginning" and think the universe as a whole applies to it, and only use it for cases that make sense -- some particular time slice of the world as we usually use it.

But there are certain things you need for descriptions of anything to even make sense or be anything. I feel like indeterminism can even be self-refuting, because whatever indeterministic mechanism you describe itself can't have any nature because by being indeterministic it can't even conform to the descriptions you gave to it. And you might say, well that's what you would expect from indeterminism -- well, first of all, that's the same thing as describing the nature of indeterminism, deterministically, and second of all, even if that wasn't a problem, all that would say is that if indeterminism is true, then indeterminism is true; it doesn't get us anywhere but tell us something we already knew. Whatever indeterministic mechanism there is, we can never come to understand it, probably because it has nothing to do with describing worlds.

         The article was about time, but the last paragraph talk about what the future being fixed may or may not imply about free will.....       That's because I think when something is set in motion,(time)-- it can't be stopped.

And yeah I get there's quantum physics and such, but I think the oddities there are probably just due to a lack of human understanding. There may well be a perfectly consistent description of particle behavior that we just haven't come to yet. Even if the world was probabilistic in some sense, there would still have to be something about that world that made it so, which itself would be well defined. A god should be able to find an algorithm to make the world probabilistic and a different one to make it not so.

       (Sorry, I had a coffee disaster there, then I couldn't find your quote).  Post 39--beginnings and endings. Time is finite. no beginning, no end. Clocks,calendars, all created to help our understanding of time.