Proposed: The world behaves deterministically, but we must behave as though free will exists.
Posted May 2, 2011, 1:34 PM UTC
1053
Can't argue, I agree.
Also, why are you posting multiple comments on your own thread with no one else on it? There should be an edit button for the original post
*edit, nevermind, I read the rules over there---> apologies
3
<grin> No worries.
1
The material world appears to behave deterministically. A dualistic worldview is required for the intervention of free will, and there is no substantial evidence for dualism.
2
Consciousness and the ability to experience is sufficient evidence for dualism. The mind body problem is a very significant problem with hard materialism and this translates into it being a flaw with hard determinism as well. When I gaze out into this room, I see colors--colors that have a meaningful physical referential definition--insofar as, it is well understood the means by which color is perceived--yet have no meaningful physical perceptive definition--insofar as, there is no arrangement of atoms that defines what I see as green. The same applies to any and all physical sensations--the means for the sensations perception is well understood, but the perception of the sensation itself is not--if I poke myself with a needle, I will feel pain. I will feel pain as nerves send a signal through my body to my spinal column, up my spinal column, into my brain, where dopamine production would be altered in such a way that pain would be my perception. But in what physical way can this pain that I am perceiving be defined? What organization of physical components is how it feels? Does this suggest that physical components feel in a certain way? It is far more rational to assume, in relative congruency with modern science, that there are non-physical components to the human body as well--suggesting a dualistic view of the self is more reasonable.
To this degree, free-will is entirely possible, although it is not a possibility to know whether or not we truly have free will because that would require complete solving of the self, something that from the standpoint of the self is an impossibility.
2
I don't feel that you've established that consciousness is evidence for dualism. Responses to your examples in a second post, but what evidence can you provide that consciousness occurs when separated from its material source, or that it is not simply an emergent behavior of complex neurological activity?
3
Changes to the neurons materialists believe are responsible for consciousness (i.e. the brain) have a profound and predictable effect on consciousness. Changes in consciousness (e.g. medical/psychological pathologies) can be traced to/affected by purely physical means (injuries/diseases/drugs).
1
In response to your examples:
-
the color you perceive to be green can be identified as a particular range of wavelengths. You and I may disagree on where green ends and blue begins, but that is social conditioning and can be corrected for.
-
what you perceive as pain can be removed by purely physical means (anesthesia) or replicated by proper application of electric signal to the brain, regardless of whether or not the actual cause of the pain is occurring. Phantom limb syndrome (pain without the actual limb) can be observed as misfires of the nerves that were terminated. So the definition of pain is bounded by the signals that your body sends your brain, indicating pain.
2
I think you might be missing the point of what I'm saying. Those are the physical means that create the perceptions, what would be the physical definitions for the perceptions themselves? A wavelength is a wavelength--where does my brain get the information to translate that into what I see as color? Where does my brain get the information translate the signals my brain receives into what I feel as pain?
2
These are the processes that happen in the brain, are understanding of which is still quite limited.
Wouldn't the same line of reasoning lead you to ask, how, when I press the "k" on the keyboard, does the computer know I mean the idea of "k", no matter what program I'm in or font I'm using. We are technologically literate; the answer should come to us easily, and without supposing the computer has consciousness. Take it a step further, and ask how when we scan in a page of text, how the computer can pick out a "k" with a wide range of font variation and assign it a similar meaning? W can see the logical process here - what happens in our body is only several orders further along in complexity. It does not evidence consciousness as something non-material any more than it does in a computer.
1
[] (/prawn)
I'm a physics student. My current understanding is that quantum mechanics is our best description of what happens, but it's interpretation is independent of the math. So far, I haven't seen any convincing evidence that the world is either deterministic or stochastic.
Either way, I think the question of whether or not the world behaves deterministically is irrelevant to whether or not we should behave as though free will exists.
Let's look at the past. Regardless of how/why it happened, it did. You can extrapolate to say the same of the future. Something specific will happen. What that is is irrelevant. The point is that it is unknown and single-valued.
So how do we treat this unknown? That's our choice (pardon the choice of words, lol), so we may as well use the most effective way. If you can't predict it, then you have no choice but to leave it as unknown (to you). Having no choice but to leave it as unknown is how I think of your initial statement.
IOW if you can't determine something's outcome, you have no alternative to treating it as not fixed.
tl;dr If you can't rule out all but one possibility, you have to allow for multiple possibilities. "More than one possibility for a single result" = "free will"
2
This is a terrific point, and it makes me wonder if I have been using the term 'deterministic' flippantly.
Do you think, though, that it is fair to equate "free will" and stochasticism, rather than suggesting that stochasticism is but a third option? Free will, I would contend, requires an element of choice, where stochasticism relies on the random, no?
I don't think I can fairly tag this pro or con, so I shall follow your lead:
[] (/prawn)
1
I wasn't trying to equate the two. To me, it's more like equating free will and the inability to predict the future wherever that inability comes from. If the future is determined it can in theory be predicted (aka said to be fixed), and if the universe is inherently stochastic it fundamentally cannot. It's just that that it's so damned complex that even if it could potentially be predicted, we are often unable to do so. Where we are unable to predict the future, we cannot treat it as fixed.
edit: i initially included the bit about whether or not the universe is deterministic to preclude an argument like the one with cnbdream about how we see/hear green. At the bottom of it, there's no evidence yet to say either way if reality can be physically predicted/described.
1
To me, it's more like equating free will and the inability to predict the future wherever that inability comes from.
That's more or less what I thought you were equating anyway. I suppose I am now arguing that there are three possibilities, not just two:
- the future is predetermined based on physical(otherwise) states, and is completely predictable. (predeterminism)
- the future is decided through a confusion of physical processes and the choices made by rational actors. (free will)
- the future is created spontaneously based on random events beyond our control, and is neither decided by choices or predictable in detail.(the new and improved option, which is convenient to call stochasticism)
1
[deleted]
1
I mostly want to agree, but recent breakthroughs in quantum physics have revealed that at a fundamental level the atomic world is random and unpredictable. A deterministic world by definition must be completely computable at least in theory, but the new science raises new questions regarding the stability and certainty of the universe.
1
First, I'm curious about the breakthroughs you're talking about. (not in a disbelieving way, but in a "oh cool! lemme see!" way)
Second, I don't think a deterministic world has to be computable, it just has to be fully determined by previous states. I could be straight-up wrong here, but I though there were a few more requirements to computability.
2
Basically, quantum mechanics points towards a university of probability rather than predictable certainty.
2
Nope, it doesn't point in either way. If you think of the particle as point-like and local, then it does sort of point to a stochastic universe. But the whole idea of QM is that a particle either isn't or isn't just a result of a single point in phase-space. So there's no reason to lean towards that interpretation.
Basically QM's standard interpretation says that when you measure the location, for example, of a particle that was a moment ago in some exactly given initial state there is a probability distribution of where you will measure it to be. If you measure and get x then the particle is only now at exactly x. It wasn't at x until you measured it to be there.
Alternatively, you could say that the particle (its wavefunction to be more precise) followed some deterministic trajectory. Having well defined exact states all along the way. Here, instead of some stochastic process, you are just uncertain as to exactly where the particle is. It has an exact state, but you don't know exactly what that state is.
The math of QM clearly works. It's the interpretation that people disagree on, but there's no reason to give more credence to either. I think the reasons the standard statistical interpretation is more followed are historical and the fact that it is easier to work with.
I didn't say it that very well, but the intro to this thesis (pp. 3-6) puts it really well with regards to one of my favorite non-standard interpretations.
2
Excellent response! Thank you!
1
[deleted]
1
[deleted]
1
That's a fair question. I intended that to mean "We cannot do otherwise but", which probably doesn't answer the question. Perhaps a hybrid of example 1 and 3?
1
We behave as if free will exists - we punish people for "wrong" actions, as if they could have made a different choice, and regularly act as if there is more than one possible outcome to the choices we make - moving to this city or that, choosing this entree or that on the menu.
We MUST behave as though free will exists to maintain social order. No punishment for antisocial behavior (because was unavoidably predetermined) will lead to an anarchic breakdown, and in any case is itself a choice that implies we could punish antisocial behavior or not.
In a society without the illusion of free will, those who commit crimes would be incarcerated to prevent further commission of crime. Prisons would institute programs which, in order to allow the release of an individual, would be required to demonstrate their capacity to act in a way that is not destructive of society. It would not be considered punishment, but a sort of quarantine.
I'm not sure if this really deserves a tag, but...
Would this also be true for crimes of passion? If we judge someone on a "pre-crime" basis like this (the point of incarceration is a quarantine rather than punitive), would this society be equally likely to incarcerate those with a statistical likelihood of committing a crime, even if up to that point they are innocent. For example, would they be likely to incarcerate a man who realized his wife was cheating on him, if he's known to have a temper?
Not necessarily. The leaders of such a society might realize that having committed a crime in the past is not necessarily an indicator that one is likely to commit a crime again in the future.
Another possibility is that in such a society, more effort would be spent on research to be able to predict whether or not an individual is likely to commit a crime, and then pre-emptively imprison them such that they are unable to do so.
Yet another possibility is the ultimate laissez-faire policy, where nobody is imprisoned for any reason at all, because they weren't destined to be imprisoned. Or maybe they are imprisoned, because they were destined to be imprisoned.
My core point is that the scenario that you outlined is the only possibility.
[deleted]