Determinism is rooted in a metaphysics that says humans are not fundamentally different from anything else in the universe. This metaphysics is one most of share in common as ``children these days are nearly born empiricists''; however, the implications of this metaphysics are rarely fully accepted. Determinism is the view that like everything else human-beings' actions are causally determined, that it's impossible for us to truly freely just as it's impossible for us to make a machine that can violate causation. We are fundamentally machines which accept a history, a biology, and a environment, and return a action.
Many respond to this by redefining freedom. They say that freedom isn't the ability to act freely but rather to not be effected by outside forces. What makes outside forces so much less coercive than internal forces though? If I'm mandated to do something one way or another why does it matter who or what mandates it? Can moralities and politics of pure unjustified freedom exist along with Determinism?
Metaphysicists would rather attribute motives than refine real world qualities in a skilled, professional manner. And they take their findings to support the toe without looking closely at the matter. Are you trying to appear the scientist or an advertiser in this post?! You cannot succeed at both. SO DO THE BUMBLINGS OF A BIG BEE, ELEPHANT, OR JELLYFISH.
Usually, metaphysicists add in the lie that the opposition *has* no evidence, never did, and never will, but you didn't do so here. Is it only done to win a point? If so, why the waste in science? IT JUST GOES TO SHOW US ANOTHER AREA OF UNPROFESSIONAL JUDGMENT AND INSINCERITY THAT IS FUNDAMENTALLY BIASING EVOLUTIONISTS' SCIENTIFIC, FACTUAL CONSIDERATIONS OF THIS THREAD'S TITULAR QUESTION. I also learned sometime ago that the wit of India asnd Indian national variant of English can ring rungs (a)round evolutionists arguments, despite all their writ(h)ing and racist-like overtones to the contrary, i.e., their indications that it actually run(g)s rings.
Once again, definitions are not constructed out of evidentiary statements in proper uses of the scientific method- not even in evolution studies. Actually, I think this is usually done by evolutionists through the use of anthropomorphisms and folk wisdom that interprets what is pragmatic as an indicator of intelligence- definitions that most ID proponents don't even use. TWELVE MINUTES OF READING MUST NOT BE ENOUGH TO PROVIDE INSIGHT ANYMORE. Determinists are fucking Jews.
Grayson Adams
Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?
Cameron Morgan
This reads like a Markov bot rendered from some strange Indian forum, I'll respond to those pieces I can decipher anyway in case it's something else.
Neither of these is correct, Metaphysicists attempt to design a consistent way of thinking about the world for example ``being is becoming, everything is a process or ``the world is composed of objects with attributes
I'm not personally a empiricist, due to the Münchhausen trilemma, I don't even believe in truth let alone that our sense organs are a accurate reflection of ``true reality''. I tend to think of reality as a projection of processes by our conceptual system onto a otherwise unknowable reality, but the projections that my mind produces happen to be causally deterministic, as I imagine most humans' projections are. This isn't particularly relevant I don't think though.
Elijah Morales
A poorly written Markov bot?
Zachary Allen
How new are you?
Gavin Nguyen
This poster right here knows exactly what he's talking about, the moment he mentioned Markov bots and the Münchhausen trilemma I knew he was my nigga. I also agree with what he said, the op's erratic typing style instantly gave off an aura of the uncanny valley.
Brandon Edwards
I started posting Zig Forums four years ago, stopped talking online generally two years ago, and started posting here again last month. I'm unsure how long I'll stay.
Levi Murphy
:s/posting/posting on/
Samuel Brown
"Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?" is an old meme that is commonly cited whenever someone posts anything that is rendered incomprehensible by gramatical errors.
Jeremiah Cruz
I agree with determinism in the aspect that humans have no "free will", but it would be impossible to determine the future due to quantum mechanics (QM). In a nut shell QM is nondeterministic theory. You can only give probable outcomes of the future, but never with 100 percent certainty. Since QM is theory of the very small and gives rise to all of classical physics, this means that the universe is nondeterministic. Also there is some evidence in psychology that your brain will determine to do something even before you consciously decide to do it.
With this, I believe that humans have no "free will" but its impossible to determine human behavior, like all things with 100 percent reliability. Now bare in mind the QM effects on human behavior is very small. Now predicting behavior with knowable facts is also incredibly difficult, due to incredible amount of variables that have large enough affect behavior on the individual scale. But in terms of nations and all of humanity there is a lot less variables that affect the course of them, making predictions far more accurate.
Since we can never predict the future with a 100 percent accuracy to due QM and the amount of variables we have to know to determine individual behavior is so much this gives arise to "free will". I agree with redefining freedom in that isn't "the ability to act freely but rather to not be effected by outside forces". And in our every day lives we can easily determine what our decisions are vs things we were told to do. Humans have shown to be happier when we make our own decisions vs being directed to do something, even if your decisions aren't because of "free will".
Daniel Robinson
If hard determinism is true, it would theoretically (keep that in mind) allow one to create a machine that can with 100% accuracy predict the future. But if you get your answer from this machine, let's say it says that ten seconds from now, you will go to your kitchen and make coffee, what is actually preventing you from doing otherwise?
Thoughts on this?
Oliver Hernandez
Sorry, I'm quite bad about omitting words among other things, I don't know why. Here's my attempt at a understandable version:
Jaxon Jenkins
Im guessing that there are two things that can happen.
One the act of knowing the future makes it not guaranteed, and with that you can choose not to go to the kitchen and make coffee in ten seconds. In essence kinda like a reverse Schrödinger's box.
Or two the universe will prevent you from changing the future by forcing you too make coffee. If that was true and you can't prevent the future from happening it would more likely that you can't know the future. Kinda of like how the universe prevents you from breaking causality by preventing you from traveling faster than light.
Levi Richardson
Bell's Theorem just says that you have to give up locality not causality, despite this the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics does surrender causality unnecessarily. Pilot wave theory preserves causality only giving up on locality, and I don't know of any reason to prefer the Copenhagen interpretation to it.
I agree that prediction is exceptionally difficult on the individual scale. Although I differ in the thinking that this is due to variables. Humans are capable of modeling exceedingly complex systems in terms of pure functions, the difficulty comes when you're trying to keep track of complex state. (there is lots of research in computer science on this) It's not that we can't measure all the things that go into a persons day, and start to predict what they'll do based on their genetics (especially with genomics), it's that we can't keep track of the internal state of a human, what went into their life until this point, and how that effected their development, both physiologically and in terms of memories.
This is interesting, you're not arguing that freedom is a legitimate basis for a philosophy but rather that because happiness is the highest objective and because people are happy when they think they are free we should have freedom. I think hedonism or hedonistic utilitarianism is a sound way to restructure the politics of freedom in the face of determinism. It also gives you something measurable to direct your politics, even though it seems a little strange.
Ayden Wood
The problem with this is that the program would be considered ``non-total'', there is no guarantee of it completing. This is because every time the machine predicts the future it would need to re-predict the effects of displaying its output. It might be that there is no output it can give that doesn't effect the future if it's looked at before the time comes for certain situations.
Joshua Campbell
This is false, read instead: It might be that there is no output which doesn't render the output false if it's looked at before the time comes for certain situations.
Thomas Carter
But central nervous systems are stochastic devices. Below the realm of interplanetary physics where gravity rules all, stochastic processes are the rule within intraplanetary systems.
Liam Gutierrez
I'll concede that variables are the limiting factor of accurately modeling human behavior. This is outside of my field and I wrongly assumed my knowledge was applicable.
Hudson Murphy
impossible for us to make a machine that can violate causation
Yes but machines don't need cops, priests, .or the threat of going broke to keep going. You just set a machine running, and it runs until it wears out.
"Consider also the ordinary way of performing and guiding human actions through advice, through laws and precepts, through exhortations and censures, through promises of reward and threats of punishment. All this would be superfluous if human beings operated by a necessarity of nature and not by their own freedom. " 'Thus, in the preceding assertion we verified the exercise of freedom that we experience within ourselves, and a free faculty is inferred evidently from this exercise of freedom, in the way that a power is inferred from an act." - Francisco Suarez(1548-1617), On Efficient Causality
As an aside, Suarez had some interesting things to say which go against the " everything is connected" views of our board's esoteric spammers. ( Blood, race, religion, ttadition, sinister plots by the outsiders, ecc… all supposedly connected.. . ), I'm not a Christian,not by any means, but credit where its due, this is an interesting :
"… an intelligence's immediate proximity to a body is necessary in order for him to be able to move the body locally. theologians claim that the angels are present by suppositum to the bodies which they assume and in which they appear. And as often as Scripture says that an angel moves or carries off a human being, it indicates that the angel is substantively present there or that he is moved along with the thing that he moves. "
Am I understanding correctly the argument is that people are born good, so if there isn't freedom there isn't a need for regulation? If this is what the argument is it seems to neglect genetic abnormalities and environmental conditions like abuse which lead to amoral behavior.
Oliver Walker
The argument is that people have free will, not that they're born good. They can choose to be good or evil- that's why regulations ecc exist. Suarez was a medieval theologian, so he thinks in terms of celestial bodies propelled by angels (astrology), rather than genetics and environment. But he nevertheless seems to think that mind is of primary importance, and physical/bodily factors secondary: "the minds of human beings are in themselves immaterial, and they have freedom to the extent that they are immaterial and operate through an immaterial faculty. And so the influence of the celestial bodies cannot deprive human beings of the exercise of freedom, even if this influence can, by the mediation of the body and its affections, incline them indirectly toward one of the two parts [of a contradiction] to a greater or lesser degree. "
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Benjamin Lopez
Why is "violate causation" anybody's stipulation for free will? If your action is random (uncaused), then how is it you taking the action rather than chance? This conception of free will as violation of causality implies us being separate from the rest of the universe, like players in a video game or something, able to act outside the universe as such. That is at least consistent with us being part of the universe. I think the debate on this is backwards. Modern physics implies that the universe is non-deterministic. We should instead be asking if it's possible for our selves as defined entities (free or not) even exist at all. It's not a question of whether non-determinism is possible within determinism (categorically no), but whether determinism is possible within non-determinism (theoretically, but then does it exist within our universe?)? I think the concept of "free will" is completely incoherent and a pretty much pointless argument. In order for it to be "you" or "me" doing something, we have to be consistently defined, and if we or our "will" non-deterministic then it's necessarily indefinite insofar as our behavior is unpredictable. I would contend that the only possibility of a will, let alone a free one, is of a deterministic mind in a non-deterministic context. That is, you can be relied upon to behave a certain way for any set of conditions but it's not clear what set of conditions you will have. Does that leave room for "freedom"? If we have the opportunity to reflect and imagine possible courses of action, we can at the very least be deliberate even if we're not "free". If the universe is non-deterministic or chaotic enough from our perspective, that would suggest we could deliberately act so as to take chances that put ourselves in a novel context until we find one that causes us to act how we want.
Nathan Williams
I think determinism is almost certainly false, and your thought experiment does a good job explaining why it's contradictory for a closed system to be deterministic. It's a bit like "if God is omnipotent, can he make an object too heavy for himself to lift?"
Well then it's not hard determinism. We can create models that predict pretty chaotic behavior with decent accuracy, so it's a bit too dubious and vague to say "you can't know the future." I mean, within what tolerances? The "speed of light" is a universal speed limit. Anything with zero mass travels at that speed in a vacuum. It's more like the speed of causality itself. And we think that you can break it via quantum entanglement, so that would imply that if scaled up you could violate causality in a way that's intuitively meaningful to a human.
Here's an experiment. Set up some randomly decaying particle to be monitored. When it decays send a signal via quantum entanglement to a machine far away (with faster-than-human reaction time). Give the machine a button to press (or digital equivalent). When that button is pressed, it sends a signal via quantum entanglement back to the machine monitoring the decay. That "response" signal should disable the monitor. Since quantum entanglement ignores the speed limit, this should "prevent" the monitor from reading the radioactive decay and sending the first entanglement signal, thus violating causality. Some possible outcomes:
Ryder Ross
This is simply the way I've heard it described, a sort of authentic individual spontaneity, the truth is I've always struggled to even imagine what this would look like though.
It upsets me how much faith is placed in the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, modern physics only states that our universes it non-local in line with Bell's theorem. Given this knowledge the Copenhagen Interpretation removed causality and determinism unnecessarily, pilot wave theory preserves causality and determinism without making any clear sacrifices. That being said these are both only theories designed to explain empirical observation
This is an exceptionally interesting post, I need to ruminate on it. Thanks so much for replying.
Christian Baker
I'm responding to the general discussion more than you here. I think the assumption a lot of people have in the free will argument are holdovers from a time when we understood very little about the universe or our psychology. It's a concept that should be re-evaluated at a fundamental level and not just retrofitted onto modern science. Going into alternates is a bit beyond the scope of a single post (I already had to split it once). I do tend to favor the Copenhagen model or many worlds interpretation because to me it seems others tend to assume that the conclusions should be more palatable to us. There's no reason to think that our monkey brains would be equipped to intuitively grasp the physics of the very small or very large (and even some physics at our scale is unintuitive to us - pic related). People had similar issues with relativity but now it's foundational to a lot of our technology (notably GPS). The universe doesn't care whether it makes sense to us. After all, from our perspective it sure does look like the sun goes round the earth like the moon does.
