It is apparently the case that determinism is closely associated by a lot of people with the ability to make predictions about human choices. I am curious what people that actually think determinism is probably correct think about this.
Does Determinism Imply Predictability?
Posts
Total:
35
-->
@Discipulus_Didicit
My understanding of determinism; is that when someone makes a choice; what that choice ends up being does not stem from our conscious ability to chose: but from the physical laws operating on our brain; such that if we knew enough about the states of all the matter involved; the decision would be predictable.
However, the number of potential qualifying factors are so large that we would never realistically be able to predict anything.
I’m of the view of Quantum Determinism: that chance plays a factor in a quantum sense; so some things will boil down to probabilities - but there is still no non physical entity that is able to qualify our choices - so the things we do is ultimately dependent on the laws of physics, rather than our own personal volition.
-->
@Discipulus_Didicit
Choices are easy to predict relative to individual electrical signals. The more macro the system, the easier the prediction generally speaking. Time scale ties in to this due to the possibility of an array of influencing factors. Choice in that regard would be less predictable.
In short predictions are only as good as their predictors.
-->
@Discipulus_Didicit
As a very small part of a much bigger system that is itself part of a much larger system it is hard to monitor all possible relevant factors and so the system is inherently unpredictable from my perspective. This is true of the most celebrated and foremost expert in any subject. Predictions can be made and some hypothesis and theories make better predictions than others and so are more valuable mechanisms but this does not mean we can reliably predict any given outcome with total certainty.
The universe seems fickle because determinism is obdurate and exponentially more complex the more we learn (rather than simpler) even as our knowledge allows us to not just create wonders undreamed of even just twenty five years ago (and frankly probably impossible to explain to someone who lived two hundred years ago) but to make them ordinary.
-->
@Discipulus_Didicit
To me, determinism ends up being a coin toss, which is predictable, but it is a very limited selection of potential choices: heads, tails, edge, and complete unknown [in the remote chance, but predictable] that the coin disappears, such as inside down a floor vent, or outside, through a grate. In the latter case, another coin is likely flipped. In keeping with the theme of determinism, it is not a choice made by the person at all. The person has abdicated choice to the physical conditions outside that person's control, affecting the force, distance, and relative direction of the toss, the speed of spin, the ambient micro-climate conditions, and the relative surface conditions on which the coin lands and bounces, if the latter condition occurs at all. Determinism is, therefore, complete abdication of choice; an absurdity that is entirely possible with cowards who want no encounter with the universe; cowards, because no one else would stoop to such abdication.
-->
@Ramshutu
but there is still no non physical entity that is able to qualify our choices - so the things we do is ultimately dependent on the laws of physics, rather than our own personal volition.
That argument is disconnect. First you say no non-physical entity can qualify choices, then say we, physical entities, cannot make personal choices. Who can, then? Of course, that's your point; no one can, thus determinism, quantum, or not.
Then, as I offered - disagreeing with the concept, you believe the coin toss. But, just as the ultimate realization from Matrix is that there is no spoon, then there is neither a coin. What now?
-->
@949havoc
That argument is disconnect. First you say no non-physical entity can qualify choices, then say we, physical entities, cannot make personal choices. Who can, then? Of course, that's your point; no one can, thus determinism, quantum, or not.Then, as I offered - disagreeing with the concept, you believe the coin toss. But, just as the ultimate realization from Matrix is that there is no spoon, then there is neither a coin. What now?
Huh? I read this post three times and it’s still not clear what your point is.
If i decide whether to have Pizza or Burgers tonight, it feels like a free choice that I could make - but the reality is that it is the laws of physics ultimately determining which choice I make; what deal like me making a true choice is merely an illusion that feels like true choice.
-->
@Ramshutu
Occam turning in his grave, such a convoluted spin you unravel. What, don't get how coin tosses work? See Occam.
-->
@949havoc
Occam turning in his grave, such a convoluted spin you unravel. What, don't get how coin tosses work? See Occam.
I am actually completely fine with coin tosses, chaos theory, etc.
It’s just completely unclear how anything you said relates to what I am talking about; and even less clear as to why you feel I am making additional assumptions that warrants the invocation of Occam.
It seems you’ve made a bit of a rambling argument and forgot to explain why what you said is actually relevant.
A dog could exhibit free will if and only if it could've chosen a different action. The condition for determinism to be true is if it's not possible for the dog to have chosen a different action that it did.
-->
@949havoc
If any action has a cause then it is deterministic. Determinism is not freewill.
If any action has no cause (undetermined) then it is indistinguishable from random. Random occurrences are not freewill.
No clever mix of caused and uncashed leads to freewill.
Freewill is logically incoherent.
-->
@Ramshutu
If i decide whether to have Pizza or Burgers tonight, it feels like a free choice that I could make - but the reality is that it is the laws of physics ultimately determining which choice I make;
All "choices" are actually determinations based on a mixture of ones personal preferences (not a choice) and external factors/consequences (not a choice).
-->
@secularmerlin
If any action has a cause then it is deterministic. Determinism is not freewill.
Sure, if you act before you think, and some do that. It's called woke.
Where action driven is by prior thought , the thought is the cause. But thinking is not determinism, because determinism is just like abdicating to letting a coin toss determine your action. Therefore, determinism is a coin toss, and act of limited results, whereas thinking through a problem of which action to take is reflective of past experience, and contemplating different actions if different results are expected, since doing the same thing expecting different results is caving into the last time the situation you're now in occurred, and that's caving to the coin toss. Therefore, reflecting on different actions to achieve a different result is free will at work, not wokeness.
-->
@949havoc
Thinking doesn't change the equation. Every thought is either caused (detetministic) or uncaused (indistinguishable from a random event) and neither leaves room for freewill. That you have a will doe not make it free.
-->
@secularmerlin
That you have a will doe not make it free.
It's a gift, that comes without price, other than your ambition. It's why it's called free will, because, to date, no one has been able to put a price on ambition. Maybe because it's free to whomever chooses to engage it? That the universe messes with my brain chemistry is so not Occam, you're going to have to tell me he really didn't have a razor. Can you?
-->
@949havoc
Please do not be pedantic. I do not mean freec(without cost) I mean free (unconstrained by outside factors). Nothing is unconstrained by outside factors that I am aware of.
With the possible exception of all of existence in its totality
-->
@949havoc
Where action driven is by prior thought , the thought is the cause. But thinking is not determinism, because determinism is just like abdicating to letting a coin toss determine your action. Therefore, determinism is a coin toss, and act of limited results, whereas thinking through a problem of which action to take is reflective of past experience, and contemplating different actions if different results are expected, since doing the same thing expecting different results is caving into the last time the situation you're now in occurred, and that's caving to the coin toss. Therefore, reflecting on different actions to achieve a different result is free will at work, not wokeness.
It appears, again, you do not seem to understand what determinism actually is.
What Determinism actually is - is us making choice, us thinking things through, and us making decisions - but that the cause of our decisions is not some ephemeral agency; but the laws of physics.
We receive light, sound, touch: physics.
The physical inputs are converted into electrochemical signals : physics
Those electrochemical signals cause a neurone for fire electrochemical signals to its neighbours: physics.
A complex interaction of input to the neurone, together with its strength of connection to neighbour ripples across various portions of the brain: physics and chemistry.
Those infections continue to fire, and then exercise motor neurones connected to muscle: physics
Muscles contract and actions are performed: physics.
It’s all just physics.
“Choice” is what we call our perception of how that process plays out.
We are fire, but a bit more complex - a very long, very complex and very slow chemical reaction.
-->
@Ramshutu
We receive light, sound, touch: physics.
And so you begin a list of activities concluding in a decision to act. A process.
What If, after all that thinking, I choose something else? The freedom of speech, a willful act, does not compel me to speak. Your determinism insists that once begun, the process only concludes by action driven by the universe. What if I say, "no?" Did the universe go through all that just for me to choose another path? Nope, because you've laid out the universe's process, and it must go through it again to justify my rejection.
Occam turns in his grave.
-->
@949havoc
What if, after all that thinking, I chose something else?
Again; for about the 26th time you comprehensively fail to understand what determinism actually is. You are conflating the choices we make deriving solely as a product of the laws of physics (determinism); with not being able to make choices. It’s bizarre.
The choice you make, after all that thinking, is the product of physical laws operating on your brain. You can’t make any other choice. The choices we make feel free, and feel as if they are our own, but this free will is illusory.
Or in other words. If you are confronted with a fork in a road: you can go left, you can go right. The decision is governed solely by the laws of physics and chemistry; not by any agency - because any exercise is that agency itself is determined by these same physical laws.
There is no quantifiable difference between a system of true free will, and a deterministic system in which choice is determined by chaotic processes that are impossible to practically predict.
-->
@949havoc
What If, after all that thinking, I choose something else?
Faux, there is no concrete proof of determinism that I am aware of so you are free to think that it is incorrect. You could at least understand what it is actually saying though rather than straw manning it as the concept really is quite simple.
-->
@Ramshutu
Occam would not agree with the convolution that is determinism. Nor does God.
-->
@Discipulus_Didicit
Don't know who that is.
-->
@949havoc
Occam would not agree with the convolution that is determinism. Nor does God.
Well that’s a load of nonsense. I think you can probably add Occam’s razor the list of things you don’t seem to understand.
Occam’s razor is that explanations with fewer assumptions are more likely.
Given that determinism is simply the application of our laws of physics - and that any assertion of non-deterministic free will requires you to assume there is part of the brain that is not subject to the known laws of physics in the way we observe them - it’s pretty clear that the free will side is clearly at he wrong end of the razor.
-->
@Ramshutu
"THE LAWS OF PHYSICS"
as if that is the holy grail of ultimate knowledge. Bullshyte, and science will be first to admit it. The "laws" of physics are in constant flux; they're not a just a constant. Just two hundred years ago, [the age of climate science, at best, by the way - so goes Green New Deal] the laws of physics said Earth was central to the universe. All the evidence pointed to that. Two hundred years. A blink.
So don't give me your "laws" of physics. They're as changeable as probability, and you admitted that probability is/is not in play. Make up your mind.
But free will has been what it is for thousands of years.
-->
@949havoc
THE LAWS OF PHYSICS"as if that is the holy grail of ultimate knowledge. Bullshyte, and science will be first to admit it. The "laws" of physics are in constant flux; they're not a just a constant. Just two hundred years ago, [the age of climate science, at best, by the way - so goes Green New Deal] the laws of physics said Earth was central to the universe. All the evidence pointed to that. Two hundred years. A blink.
What in earth is this ridiculous drivel? You’ve just sailed off onto a silly tangent.
We’re talking about Occams Razor. In this respect, you have to assume there is some part of your brain that exists outside the laws of physics.
Laws of physics as in the physical principles in which physical things interact - which definitely appear to exist - rather than the physical laws and theories that humans have created to describe them.
That’s still true; and nothing you said challenges that characterization. Meaning that free will still fails Occam’s razor
That being said, the “laws” as written by humans are not actually flux at all - that’s what makes them laws. I mean, the laws of thermodynamics, motion, electromagnetism, gravity, etc - are still as true now as they were when they were written. We have additional laws, and broader understanding- but it’s not like chemistry suddenly works differently than it did yesterday.
Worse still it misses the point: we measure our brain as physical, our understanding of it, is that it is governed by electrochemical reactions - we may not have all the understanding of how it works, or the laws it follows; but it requires no assumption to presume a physical thing follows physical laws - no matter how much you want it to. That’s my point ; that you ignored.
So don't give me your "laws" of physics. They're as changeable as probability, and you admitted that probability is/is not in play. Make up your mind.
No they’re not lol. When’s the last time you floated off the earth because the law of gravity changes: or computers stopped working because laws of quantum tunneling shifted. This is petulant nonsense.
If you paid attention, they key point between quantum and non-quantum determinism is that in one case you have no real choice, but the outcome is not fixed if the exact same state was repeated, and in the other you have no real choice, but the outcome remains unchanged if the same state was repeated.
Even with QT; the brain is probably large enough that quantum effects are not sufficient to change choice.
But free will has been what it is for thousands of years.
Your confusing what determinism is again lol.
Free will, could simply be an illusion caused by our brains being matter obeying physical rules; and it would be unchanged for thousands of years - too.
It seems that your only argument is continually pretending determinism is something it isn’t.
-->
@Ramshutu
The laws of physics don't just change at random, as you seem to suggest I've suggested. No. They change when it is found that what was found to be immutable is mutable. Law changes over time with new discovery, even if just because we recognize we have not yet captured all conditions possible that affect how physics functions, which is why we discovered that the universe is not geocentric, isn't it? It's also how we've discovered that the law of gravity is not universal; it, too, is dependent on conditions, such as being in a vacuum, or that Jesus, and Peter for a brief moment, could walk on water. They changed conditions we do not yet even understand. I'll surprise you by saying that even God is bound by laws. And that he is not the total cause of anything.
I think Peter Strawson's Freedom and Resentment is a good paper for philosophers, and I do want to mention that his paper is often lauded for its clarity on the thesis of determinism. I think it is easy to over-intellectualize the empirical side of things, when really, only few things are relevant to the problem of free will (and of defining determinism).
Plus, the answer is in Strawson's topic too, I think it should be very obvious what he meant by the word "Resentment".
Plus, the answer is in Strawson's topic too, I think it should be very obvious what he meant by the word "Resentment".
-->
@949havoc
You’re strategy is something I refer to as “picking peanuts out of poop”, which is a fallacy of relevance. Raising an irrelevant objection and ignoring the broader point so one can be seen to be objecting.
My core point is that the way physical things interact are either definitively deterministic, or statistical in nature. There is no mechanism by which some physical outcome can be changed solely by thought; especially given that thought appears to be physical in nature itself, and thus dependent on the same deterministic or statistical interactions of other things.
Of course, you’ve largely ignored the central point to fixate on Occams Razor - peanut #1. Bear in mind you also engage in what I call “the Cheshire Cat”, where you provide no argument or justification but simply assert your conclusion as if you’ve already demonstrated it; whereas in reality all that can be seen is the smile. In this respect just blurting about Occam with no justification.
As I pointed out with Occam, the razor is on the side of determinism as it requires fewer assumptions. I do not have to assume there is a mechanism by which thought can alter the deterministic outcomes of physics.
Of course, you ignore this too; and instead focus on peanut #2. Which in this case, is claiming that the laws of physics are not set, and somehow our lack of firm knowledge impacts my argument (whilst Cheshire catting by not specifying how and why).
Of course your new argument has no relevance to your last argument - as I’m not talking about the laws of physics as we understand them - but the actual deterministic and statistical rules everything appears to follow. The point being that even if we don’t know what those rules are, to presume that the mind can change physical things without that change being predicated on some deterministic or statistical laws - requires an additional assumption and thus still fails Occams Razor.
This gets Ignored too; and instead you move onto peanut #3, some nonsense about how you weren’t saying that laws are random, only that they change.
Again - no relevance to Occam, or anything you just said; indeed you’ve dropped yours and my broader argument. You’re instead simply fixating on meaningless triviality.
The problem you have here, is that the laws and theories of physics we have are not so much telling you the way things are - but providing the ability to predict what happens in the world. Right and wrong don’t really have meaning, as much as accurate and inaccurate.
In this respect, and which was my point, the laws of gravity, together with some of the more complex orbital interactions allow us to accurately predict the motions of the planets, calculate rocket trajectories and gravity assist sling shots. The laws of gravity are highly accurate, and we can use them to show the behaviour of gravity is deterministic - for chemistry, the physical behaviour and interaction of chemicals is deterministic also - I can tell you exactly how much energy is released burning natural gas, and how much pressure a water tank will be under is you double the temperature- because we know these laws produce highly accurate predictions.
Some elements are statistical; but highly accurate too. Interference patterns. Quantum tunneling, etc cannot predict individual atoms, but can predict the statistical outcomes highly accurately to such a degree they become deterministic at a large scale.
So in terms of Occam, it doesn’t really matter whether the laws are wrong: because they yield incredibly accurate results: all that matters is whetted what we observe of the world is deterministic - which it is: in this regard the claim that free will exists requires a fundamental violation of our observations - and thus an additional assumption that means your claim is less likely than mine.
-->
@949havoc
I doubt determinism implies perfect predictability. Here are a few considerations.
1) Chaos theory + quantum uncertainty. In the long run most systems or one of their subsystems are chaotic. That means that a small change in an intial state exhacerbates into a large change in a later state. Heisenberg's uncertaintly principle makes sure a system cannot be perfectly known, so it will usally unavoidable to have a large uncertainty in some future. For example, I suspect it is impossible to measure the position and momentum of protons and neutrons in a radioactive atom precisely enough to accurately predict when it will decay.
2) Consider the block universe, which requires determinism, that is not the universe at a specific time but over all time, where past and future are real. The future part of the universe is fixed. It is what it is. There is no possibility to invent perfect prediction machine (PPM). The universe either contains one, or doesn't. If it does contain such a machine, then that suggests must be a fundamental reason it does.
3) What does it mean to predict something ? If a prediction is something a human must be able to understand, then that limits the detail with which anything can be predicted. However, a PPM could predict everything in great detail and then just provided digestible chunks, like what a guy named John Smith will do the 6th of june 2865.
4) In order to be able to predict the future of the entire universe, the PPM must know the state of the entire universe. Let us make a very crude calculation to estimate how big that machine's memory would need to be. Suppose there are 10^89 particles in the universe (mostly photons), that the universe is a cube of 100 billion light years (10^27 m) and that we want to know the position of every particle to the precision of the Planck length (lp = 10^(-35) m). We forget about momentum, wave functions, polarization etcetera. Hence, storing the position of a particles requires log2(3 * 10^27 * 10^35) = 208 bits. So, for 10^89 particles we need 10^91 bits. A black hole has the maximum possible entropy and thus information density. Its entropy is
(1) S = kB*A/(4*lp^2), where kB is Boltzmann's constant (1,4*10^(-23) Joule/Kelvin) and A is the area of the event horizon.
The general formula for entropy is
(2) S = kB * ln(N), where N is the number of degrees of freedom.
In our case N = 2^(10^91)
That gives an entropy of S = 1.4 * 10^(-23) * ln(2^(10^91)) = 1.4 * 10^(-23) * 10^91 * ln(2) = 10^68 J/K
Combining (1) and (2) we get
A = ln(N) * 4 * lp^2 = ln(2^(10^91)) * 4 * 10(^-70) = 3 * 10^21 m²
From the surface area formula for a sphere (A = 4 * PI * R²) we get
R = sqrt(A/PI/4) = sqrt(10^19 / 4) = 1.6 * 10^10 m or 16 million km.
Since our PPM must also be able to do calculations (which black holes can't), it must have a radius of more than 16 million kilometers. That is the size of a large star.
For a galactic civilization that seems feasible. Moreover, there are probably ways of compressing the data.
5) Can a PPM predict itself ? A program that can predict of any program whether it will stop running forever or not (the halting problem) is impossible, as explained in www.youtube.com/watch?v=t37GQgUPa6k. That implies that a PPM cannot predict every system and there are problematic systems other than programs that may require prediction. Likely candidates are systems that promote paradoxes, like in the halting problem. For example, a human may decide contrary to the way it was predicted to behave. Hence, A PPM may only be successful if it keeps its predictions secret.
6) Knowing the state of everything requires measuring everything and a measurment influences the system measured, which according to quantum physics sometimes modifies non-measured variables in unknown ways.
7) Predicting the past would be easier because it has lower entropy than the future.
949havoc 22 to RamshutuOccam would not agree with the convolution that is determinism. Nor does God.
Omniscience requires determinism.