Do we have free will? Is the world indeterministic?

[Ayatollah So]

It is effectively indeterministic as even with full information I cannot predict in which universe "I" will end up in. If there was a lottery powered by a quantum random number generator and I have a one in a million chance to win, the MWI says that one of the million copies of me will win, but as the measurement destroys any connections between these copies this has no impact on all the other copies that lost. The resulting ensemble of universe is deterministic, but I do not (and cannot) care for the ensemble. It is one universe I am interested in, and I do not know beforehand which one that is.

Nonsense. You know which universe: all of them. Either all the branches are you, or none are (quantum suicide excepted). You are of course free to care only for one particular resultant universe - if you don't mind being thoroughly irrational.

It might show the way how to construct a deterministic non-local interpretation of QM that would have to be quite different from Bohmian mechanics.

David Albert says that Bohm's theory is an alternative to, rather than interpretation of, QM.

Evolution does not rule out a probabilistic brain. In your example it would suffice if the probability of the brain deciding that eating those berries is a good idea was very small.

If by very small you mean less than 1 per million generations or so, then OK. I'm mystified as to why anyone would care about a probability that small.

And as for the benefits of random experimentation, pseudo-randomness will do just fine.

Instead the claim being made is as you point out "if L and p, then f", but this is contrasted with "if L and p, then maybe f", which would be the case if there is an indeterministic element in L. This is a legitimate difference between indeterministic laws and deterministic ones.

As long as you back off the claim that "only what actually happens is possible", I'm happy.

In a deterministic world, for a given set of laws and inputs, there is exactly one possible state of the world at any specific time in the future.

That's scope-ambiguous - the necessity operator could be read as applying to the whole conditional ("Necessarily, if L and p, then f"), which would make your statement true. Or it could be read as applying just to the consequent ("if L and p, then necessarily f") which is false.

The future, whatever it will be, is inevitable if we hold the laws and present state fixed.

Eh, no. The future is going to be what it will be, but that doesn't make it inevitable. That would mean there is nothing we could do to stop it. But the future depends on what we do. So it's very much evitable.

 

[Birdjaguar]

So it is basically the illusion of free will is so complete it might as well be real?

I love it when people quote (to the letter) my favorite departed poster other than Mathilda. It was in my sig for many years:

"The illusion of free will is so complete, that it may as well be real." -- Bozo Erectus

 

[Souron]

As long as you back off the claim that "only what actually happens is possible", I'm happy.

That's scope-ambiguous - the necessity operator could be read as applying to the whole conditional ("Necessarily, if L and p, then f"), which would make your statement true. Or it could be read as applying just to the consequent ("if L and p, then necessarily f") which is false.

Eh, no. The future is going to be what it will be, but that doesn't make it inevitable. That would mean there is nothing we could do to stop it. But the future depends on what we do. So it's very much evitable.

I'm not backing off there. If we are deterministic, then what we do is fixed too. So yes, the future is inevitable.

The difference between the compatiblist and incompatibalist view points is not any kind of modal fallacy. It's on the appropriate definition of freedom. Lovett actually explained the compatiblist perspective pretty well, though he harshly called it "absurd." It's not absurd, but it is wrong.

 

[Tahuti]

Look, I don't get philosophy. I just don't.

Do I have free will? If when I go out of my front door, and I can go either right or left as I see fit, then I say yes I have free will. I make the choice.

A hard determinist (like myself for instance) would answer that your "choice" is a compulsion. You feel you want to do it, and thus do it, and otherwise, you won't. That compulsion that will certainly lead to a certain choice, is itself not chosen. For example, I do not choose to be interested in philosophy, I simply am. I do not choose to go to the right or left, I just go to the left or right. Basically, I believe free will is a sort of Boeing 747 gambit: If I make a choice, what chooses my desire to make that choice?

 

[Borachio]

This is just over-analyzing.

Stand at your front door (and this is, of course, just a metaphor for any decision point), and make the choice. If you can, then you have free will.

All you've done with your "compulsion" is chase the decision point a bit further down the line.

 

[Souron]

So one can be pretty confident that the world is actually indeterminisic at its core. Following that, there is no reason to assume that a complex nonlinear system like the human brain is fully deterministic

This was from earlier in the discussion, but I feel this point needs to be corrected. No one is assuming that the brain is fully deterministic. Rather, the question is might the brain be fully deterministic. The Copenhagen interpretation says there is almost no chance. But can the mechanics of quantum behavior be alternatively interpreted to stem from a deterministic system? Even counting plausible interpretations that have not been spelled out completely?

 

[Tahuti]

If you can, then you have free will.

We can't. It's attractive to think that way, but by the time we've made "our choice", the choice was already made, automatically and by a certain process. Even if there is a modiacum of free will, isn't it odd we automatically make the same choices and human behavior shows patterns more often than not?

 

[Borachio]

Even if there is a modiacum of free will, isn't it odd we automatically make the same choices and human behavior shows patterns more often than not?

Your observation is correct.

But all it says to me is that we don't usually exercise our free will. Not that we don't have it.

It is surprisingly difficult to exercise our will. But it can be done.

On a slightly different track:

If someone holds a gun to my head and says turn left, I still have the choice to go right or left. No one will blame me for turning left. And my choice could be said to be heavily constrained, yet I still have the choice.

 

[Tahuti]

If someone holds a gun to my head and says turn left, I still have the choice to go right or left. No one will blame me for turning left. And my choice could be said to be heavily constrained, yet I still have the choice.

The choice you think you have is constrained by internal processes that are comparable to say, the law of gravity.

 

[Borachio]

Oh right. Is that so? I don't think that way at all. I could just as easily type the opposite. But I have chosen not to. On the other hand if I jump in the air gravity gives me no choice but to fall back to earth.

 

[Traitorfish]

That's his point: the fact that you can act within a framework does not deny the existence of that framework.

 

[Birdjaguar]

How would this notion of free will affect our thinking about other forms of life? Would they have less choice than us or the same, but with a narrow scope of choices?

 

[Borachio]

^^Oh right. Well, ain't I just a thicky?

I thought he was saying I don't have any choice in my everyday world in the same way as I don't have choice but to fall back to earth. And I imagined that from this:

The choice you think you have is constrained by internal processes that are comparable to say, the law of gravity.

"The choice you think you have" i.e. I have no choice.

"comparable to the law of gravity" i.e. I have no choice but to not choose.

This is precisely why I don't do philosophy. It's just a lot of double think.

 

[Ayatollah So]

How would this notion of free will affect our thinking about other forms of life? Would they have less choice than us or the same, but with a narrow scope of choices?

I think it's obvious that many animals, mammals and birds for instance, imagine multiple action-plans and deliberate on which one to follow. So they have some degree of free will. A 5-year-old human child has more than most mammals and birds, and an adult still more. Human development shows that free will is a continuum, not a binary property.

I don't get your second question, as a narrow scope of choices is a way of having less choice - if, for example, a creature's thinking doesn't have the kind of flexibility that language facilitates. Then it won't be able to think of many alternatives, and won't be able to go "meta" with thoughts like: before any major decision, I should try to think of lots of alternatives.

 

[uppi]

Nonsense. You know which universe: all of them. Either all the branches are you, or none are (quantum suicide excepted). You are of course free to care only for one particular resultant universe - if you don't mind being thoroughly irrational.

Why it is irrational to care for the only universe that matters? If MWI was true, there would be no point to care about anything else than the universe "this" me is in. I certainly perceive only one result of a measurement. There might be other copies of me perceiving other results, but why should I care for them?

David Albert says that Bohm's theory is an alternative to, rather than interpretation of, QM.

As far as I know it is constructed to exactly match the predictions of classical quantum mechanics. Unless there are differences in those predictions, it is not an alternative, but an interpretation.

If it was meant to be an alternative, it has failed, because it cannot be used to describe quantum fields. Maybe one could use the ideas of this approach to construct a viable interpretation of QM or even an alternative that could be tested experimentally. But for itself it is more complicated and less powerful than quantum mechanics and thus useless for practical purposes.

If by very small you mean less than 1 per million generations or so, then OK. I'm mystified as to why anyone would care about a probability that small.

And as for the benefits of random experimentation, pseudo-randomness will do just fine.

How do you arrive at a number that small? I see no reason to assume that the number is that small.

I agree that pseudo-randomness would have the same benefit. But evolution does not care whether the result is random or pseudo-random (same thing with the random mutations evolution depends on). The point was that, within limits, randomness can be beneficial. Thus the argument that evolution would strongly disfavor random decisions to a degree that no randomness can happen has no merit.

I would instead argue that the ability to have random (whether truly random or pseudo-random) thoughts is important for human creativity.
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[Birdjaguar]

I think it's obvious that many animals, mammals and birds for instance, imagine multiple action-plans and deliberate on which one to follow. So they have some degree of free will. A 5-year-old human child has more than most mammals and birds, and an adult still more. Human development shows that free will is a continuum, not a binary property.

I don't get your second question, as a narrow scope of choices is a way of having less choice - if, for example, a creature's thinking doesn't have the kind of flexibility that language facilitates. Then it won't be able to think of many alternatives, and won't be able to go "meta" with thoughts like: before any major decision, I should try to think of lots of alternatives.

The determinists say we have very limited or no real choice and the nub of the issue is about meaningful choosing or not. I was looking for an opinion of the other aspect consciousness: the range of choices possible. I'm curious about they see the balance between levels of consciousness and ability to make choices. Is one more "important" than the other?

 

[Souron]

I think free will in animals should be counted as tied to consciousness, since that's necessary to have meta thoughts about considering alternatives. Otherwise you could claim that even something like a single cell processes multiple inputs to decide on one of several things it could be doing.

Consciousness is not really a continuum; an animal either has an mental model of itself or not. So if you define free will this way, it's not a continuum either. You could alternatively define free will in terms of how many choice a creature might consider, which is largely a function of intelligence and can be different even in humans. Is a lateral thinker more free than a rigid thinker? The answer to that determines if such a definition is appropriate.

 

[Angst]

This is just over-analyzing.

Stand at your front door (and this is, of course, just a metaphor for any decision point), and make the choice. If you can, then you have free will.

All you've done with your "compulsion" is chase the decision point a bit further down the line.

I saw a study once that noted that most of your "free" decisions are done about six seconds before you do it. The decisions that aren't "free" - i.e. reflexive decisions - are instinctual and have nothing to do with free will as we understand it.

Free will doesn't objectively exist. It's not even over-analyzing. There are brain scientists researching on it too.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I think free will in animals should be counted as tied to consciousness, since that's necessary to have meta thoughts about considering alternatives. Otherwise you could claim that even something like a single cell processes multiple inputs to decide on one of several things it could be doing.

Elaborate please

Consciousness is not really a continuum; an animal either has an mental model of itself or not. So if you define free will this way, it's not a continuum either. You could alternatively define free will in terms of how many choice a creature might consider, which is largely a function of intelligence and can be different even in humans. Is a lateral thinker more free than a rigid thinker? The answer to that determines if such a definition is appropriate.

So where is the line drawn between having such a model or not? It would seem you are saying that all such models are the same for all.

So do you divide things up similar to this:
non life
non animal life (single cells, bugs, plants, fish etc)
animal life (most mammals, reptiles, most birds)
conscious life (humans plus a few others)

 

[Hygro]

I actually like this thread. It tells me that when me and my friends nuke all the blue states that we aren't responsible for our actions. It was just fate.

If you are a bigot, its okay, you didn't freely choose to be one. Bernie Madoff was just doing what Bernie had to do. Cool.

Just let it roll. Friends raped your mamma? Fifty million murdered innocents? Just let it roll. Its all just part of the cosmic storm. Drill baby, drill.

You have a very strange starting assumption to your logic you need to explain. If free will is an illusion, and if we discover it to be an illusion, why would we then let people be evil and do bad things? You haven't explained why knowledge of a lack of free will leads to society not striving for the best, most just society, nor individuals seeking to do good.