Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Philosophy Club

[Good_Egg]

If determinism is true then our perception of things like representation, rationality, truth, and experimentation is an illusion.

As you know well by now, I see "illusion" as the wrong word. The randomness of dice is not so much an illusion, more a valid working approximation, a model. I'd reserve the term "illusion" for situations where there is a real gain in discarding the illusion for the reality.

The absurdity of determinism is rather significant.

Yes, believing in a mechanism of determination that is accessible to us is indeed absurd.

Suppose there are two people in a room. Give Alfie access to enough ability to measure the current state of the universe locally and enough computing power to predict the short-term future from that, and he can know what Bruno is going to say 10 seconds before he says it. Enough time for Alfie to tell Bruno what Bruno is going to say. But common experience is enough to tell us that Bruno is capable of resolving to say something different...

On the other hand, believing in a mechanism of determination that is inaccessible is a dead-end. It goes nowhere, nothing follows from it. It belongs with the idea that everything is a dream in the mind of God, or a program running in the Matrix.

In that case, belief in determinism is not so much absurd, just pointless.

[Sculptor1]

Except that you are wrong.
When you make a choice you have reasons. And it is those reasons which, at that moment determine your choice.
What other way would there be?
Would you have it that you cannot determine your own choices?

Well I believe human choice making leads to decisions, I call that Free Will, most Determinists I converse with deny such choice making, instead declaring that the specific physical brain-state at the moment of decision making will ALWAYS lead to the same outcome (therefore there are no choices).

But that is what a choice is. One brain state to another. One that you are aware of its consequences, but not the fact that it is a brain state.
I think you are straw manning the argument.

Thus I agree with you that numerous factors each individually INFLUENCE the decision making process and the summation of those factors constitute the REASON the final decision was selected BUT, and this is key, the specific physical brain-state at the moment of decision making can lead to multiple possible outcomes the difference between them being the "choosing" that is independent of the physical brain-state.

My question would be: Were you to turn back time a minute with all things being equal would you repeat your last choice?
Th answer would have to be yes, or else your choices would be meaningless. Thus for any given moment, there is a string of causality that leads back the the moment of your birth; an effect over which you had no choice.
You can only conclude that whilst you are making choices, you are not making them outside of determinism.
It is just absurd to say that you are "independent" of he physical brain. That's fantasy land.

I never said I am independent of my physical brain, I said my decisions are not totally determined by my physical brain-state BEFORE the decision making process. This because the process of decision making partially changes one's brain-state. Unless you believe thinking is independent of the brain and you just called that "fantasy land". Let me give you an example: say you develop a fantastic computer program that can predict the Dow Jones average tomorrow. You run your program in your lab 100 business days in a row and it is 100% accurate. You approach Chase Morgan to sell them your program, you get an exorbitant fee, Chase is all over the news advertising their new expertise to get more clients (which they do in droves). What happens when they run the program? Of course it doesn't predict the Dow. Why? Because the Dow is influenced by the actions of individual investors and they will behave differently with the knowledge that Chase "knows" the future, thus the existance of the program changes the behavior of the market. Just as measuring one's brain-state before a decision can't tell you what the decision will be because the process of decision making changes one's brain-state. From the same starting point (memories, preferences, biases etc) one can go through very different trains of thought to arrive at a decision. Of course, measuring the brain-state after the decision has been made is just peaking at the answer and implies nothing about causality.

FUDGE

[Wardwatcher]

It is not often understood that experiments and science presuppose free will. The experimental procedure of the scientist itself involves, as a necessary component, decisions. These decisions must be free if the scientific experiment is to have merit. This is why, for example, the funding source of research is scrutinized. When ExxonMobil funds research which concludes that we ought to invest in fossil fuels, no one takes this research seriously. This is because the researchers were not free in their decisions.

Using the observations of human subjects to disprove free will would be a bit like trying to look at your eye directly. The eye is the thing that sees. It is the thing that does the looking. Eyes cannot be directly observed apart from eyes, and an eye can never look at itself directly. Of course, nowadays we have high quality mirrors and cameras that can provide relatively accurate indirect images of eyes. But the idea that someone could directly observe their own eyes is nonsense. Such an idea forgets that everything we see is seen through our eyes, and that eyes cannot see themselves (directly). Similarly, the idea that we could directly study free will is nonsense. It forgets that we are always bound to the frame of a subject. We can no more directly study our own freedom than we can directly study our own eyes. We can no more study without freedom than we can observe without eyes.

The best Dr. Haynes could ever do would be to predict the behavior of some individuals, not predict humans qua humans (or comprehend free will in itself). But even if the greatest chess master of all time could predict human behavior with utmost accuracy, it would not follow that his own behavior is predictable. The ultimate predictor will always be unpredictable. The ultimate explainer will always be inexplicable.

Firstly, your argument in which you use the eye as an example is very interesting, I´ll definietly spend some time thinking about that.

Okay.

Secondly, while I agree with the ExxonMobil example, I have trouble equating that concrete example to execution of experiments on free will. How does having free will (supposing we have one) influence such experiment or make it untrustable?

The idea is that if an experiment is discredited once we discover that the experimenters were not free, then what would it mean for an experimenter to conclude, from their experiment, that they do not have free will? Such a finding would, like the Exxon case, invalidate their research. Freedom is a prerequisite for rationality, and for sound experimentation.

Also, I disagree that science presupposes free will: If we make the assumption that free will does not exist, then such experiment would be a result of a long chain of causalities, just as anything else in a deterministic universe. Whether an experiment happens as a result of a decision or as an event caused by another event does not disproove said experiment.

But it surely does. Suppose you read Einstein and arrive at the conclusion, "E = mc^2". Now suppose the local news press blows up, covering the town in scraps of newspaper. Having left your window open, you come home to find "E = mc^2" on your desk. Does the former equation have the same import as the latter equation? Of course not, for one is the result of free reasoning and the other is the result of mere event-causality, and event-causality is impotent to bring forth truth or representation. Apart from freedom, reason, and intentionality, there is no meaning, representation, or experimentation.

It is possible to make the case that actually free will would only hurt the trustability of experiments. Free will would give the ExxonMobil researchers freedom to willingly lie (that is not to say that it is impossible to lie in a deterministic world). The point of scientific research is to make objective conclusions based on logic/rationality. Does free will not make such objectivity only harder to achieve?

"Mere event-causality" surely can bring forth the truth. A part of a glacier breaks off: The ice falls into the sea (a demonstration of Newton´s law of gravity), the impact makes waves in the water, and so a chain of causalities follows... I see all those events as predictable, therefore repeatable - which brings us back to scientific research - we call it true because it is repeatable (if anyone were to recreate such experiments, then the same things would happen). I see all the events which follow the impact of the ice as true.
If truth is something we find, not create, then it would only be natural that truth would be found if we followed it´s causal footsteps, either into the future or past.

[Wardwatcher]

Apart from freedom, reason, and intentionality, there is no meaning, representation, or experimentation.

I think that's right, but only in a sense.

Imagine for a moment a person whose responses are simply and directly determined by what they had to eat the day before. If I had no free choice about whether to make a positive or a negative response to you, but automatically did one or the other depending on whether I'd had meat or fish for supper, you would rightly treat my agreement or disagreement as worthless. As being devoid of meaning (except as a clue to my recent diet).

What I'm suggesting to you is that "freedom" in your quoted sentence refers to the experience of freedom. Just by the way language works. You have experience of free choices and of situations where you are unfree, and what you mean by the word is based on, references, this difference.

If quantum-level determinism is true, then your experiences of freedom and unfreedom are both consistent with being quantum-level determined. But you still mean the same thing by the word, it still refers to the difference in your experience.

If one day we learn that everything - our freedom and unfreedom, our careful reasoning and our spontaneity, our good and bad intentions - is all quantum-level determined, hidden from us in fractal complexity, then this changes nothing. Our experience - and the meanings of all our vocabulary based on that experience - is as it was before.

The extrapolation from simple direct causation of one thing to quantum causation of all things is not valid. Because they relate differently to language and the meanings we convey with language.

I have addressed this in our conversation earlier in this thread. If determinism is true then our perception of things like representation, rationality, truth, and experimentation is an illusion. On the other hand, our experience of these realities implies that determinism is false.

But my point to Wardwatcher is that the putative argument or experiment which is conceived to eventually disprove free will will itself collapse in the absence of free will. The fellow who you believe could "prove" determinism via quantum mechanics would in the process also prove that his proof is not a proof at all, and that no proofs exist. His experiment would only be a consequence of "what he had to eat the day before." The absurdity of determinism is rather significant.

I think what you are pointing at (correct me if I´m wrong) is that for us to say that anything is true at all, we need some level of belief. In other words, we will never have proof for axioms (such as 2+2=4). If I remember correctly, it was Kurt Goedel who demonstrated this principle on mathematics.
Also, I agree that determinism has some flaws, for example: how did it all start? If everything must have its cause, then what caused the first thing ever? (note that asking such question is quite pointless, as the definition of first is being overlooked by the rest of the sentence)
My question is, how does free will solve this issue in your view?

[LuckyR]

Well I believe human choice making leads to decisions, I call that Free Will, most Determinists I converse with deny such choice making, instead declaring that the specific physical brain-state at the moment of decision making will ALWAYS lead to the same outcome (therefore there are no choices).

But that is what a choice is. One brain state to another. One that you are aware of its consequences, but not the fact that it is a brain state.
I think you are straw manning the argument.

Thus I agree with you that numerous factors each individually INFLUENCE the decision making process and the summation of those factors constitute the REASON the final decision was selected BUT, and this is key, the specific physical brain-state at the moment of decision making can lead to multiple possible outcomes the difference between them being the "choosing" that is independent of the physical brain-state.

My question would be: Were you to turn back time a minute with all things being equal would you repeat your last choice?
Th answer would have to be yes, or else your choices would be meaningless. Thus for any given moment, there is a string of causality that leads back the the moment of your birth; an effect over which you had no choice.
You can only conclude that whilst you are making choices, you are not making them outside of determinism.
It is just absurd to say that you are "independent" of he physical brain. That's fantasy land.

I never said I am independent of my physical brain, I said my decisions are not totally determined by my physical brain-state BEFORE the decision making process. This because the process of decision making partially changes one's brain-state. Unless you believe thinking is independent of the brain and you just called that "fantasy land". Let me give you an example: say you develop a fantastic computer program that can predict the Dow Jones average tomorrow. You run your program in your lab 100 business days in a row and it is 100% accurate. You approach Chase Morgan to sell them your program, you get an exorbitant fee, Chase is all over the news advertising their new expertise to get more clients (which they do in droves). What happens when they run the program? Of course it doesn't predict the Dow. Why? Because the Dow is influenced by the actions of individual investors and they will behave differently with the knowledge that Chase "knows" the future, thus the existance of the program changes the behavior of the market. Just as measuring one's brain-state before a decision can't tell you what the decision will be because the process of decision making changes one's brain-state. From the same starting point (memories, preferences, biases etc) one can go through very different trains of thought to arrive at a decision. Of course, measuring the brain-state after the decision has been made is just peaking at the answer and implies nothing about causality.

FUDGE

There are two huge flaws in the classic Determinism theory (and I'm not saying your postings are classic Determinism). The first is that humans routinely select options that are NOT what they desire. The second is that some decisions take a very long time and quite a bit of consideration to resolve.

Classic economic theory long suffered from the first problem, ie humans commonly make financial decisions that are NOT in their financial best interest.

Here's an example of the second, say an author is deciding the wording of a poem. He comes up with a subject, then a first draft, now he's refining that to the final draft. Do you really feel that the word choices that make up the poem can be reduced to the physical and electrical state of his brain when he came up with the idea of writing the poem? Or is there value added to the writing process by his pondering what he "desires" the final product to be?

Basically our current knowledge is that we come to a mental fork in the road, something happens in the Black Box of our brain and mind then a decision pops out of the other side of the Black Box. Subjectively we all experience the process of making decisions but we don't know objectively what the process entails at the granular level, that's why it's a Black Box. Scientists can stimulate certain areas of the brain and make you desire to do certain things, but as noted we do things we don't desire every day, so there's more to it than that.

[Sculptor1]

But that is what a choice is. One brain state to another. One that you are aware of its consequences, but not the fact that it is a brain state.
I think you are straw manning the argument.


My question would be: Were you to turn back time a minute with all things being equal would you repeat your last choice?
Th answer would have to be yes, or else your choices would be meaningless. Thus for any given moment, there is a string of causality that leads back the the moment of your birth; an effect over which you had no choice.
You can only conclude that whilst you are making choices, you are not making them outside of determinism.
It is just absurd to say that you are "independent" of he physical brain. That's fantasy land.

I never said I am independent of my physical brain, I said my decisions are not totally determined by my physical brain-state BEFORE the decision making process. This because the process of decision making partially changes one's brain-state. Unless you believe thinking is independent of the brain and you just called that "fantasy land". Let me give you an example: say you develop a fantastic computer program that can predict the Dow Jones average tomorrow. You run your program in your lab 100 business days in a row and it is 100% accurate. You approach Chase Morgan to sell them your program, you get an exorbitant fee, Chase is all over the news advertising their new expertise to get more clients (which they do in droves). What happens when they run the program? Of course it doesn't predict the Dow. Why? Because the Dow is influenced by the actions of individual investors and they will behave differently with the knowledge that Chase "knows" the future, thus the existance of the program changes the behavior of the market. Just as measuring one's brain-state before a decision can't tell you what the decision will be because the process of decision making changes one's brain-state. From the same starting point (memories, preferences, biases etc) one can go through very different trains of thought to arrive at a decision. Of course, measuring the brain-state after the decision has been made is just peaking at the answer and implies nothing about causality.

FUDGE

There are two huge flaws in the classic Determinism theory (and I'm not saying your postings are classic Determinism). The first is that humans routinely select options that are NOT what they desire. The second is that some decisions take a very long time and quite a bit of consideration to resolve.

These are not problems

Classic economic theory long suffered from the first problem, ie humans commonly make financial decisions that are NOT in their financial best interest.

Ignorance is not an argument against determinism. That is just a lack of information and understanding.
It could also be due to human having non-rational

motivations. What Galbraith and Keyes call "animal passions".



Here's an example of the second, say an author is deciding the wording of a poem. He comes up with a subject, then a first draft, now he's refining that to the final draft. Do you really feel that the word choices that make up the poem can be reduced to the physical and electrical state of his brain when he came up with the idea of writing the poem? Or is there value added to the writing process by his pondering what he "desires" the final product to be?

Basically our current knowledge is that we come to a mental fork in the road, something happens in the Black Box of our brain and mind then a decision pops out of the other side of the Black Box. Subjectively we all experience the process of making decisions but we don't know objectively what the process entails at the granular level, that's why it's a Black Box. Scientists can stimulate certain areas of the brain and make you desire to do certain things, but as noted we do things we don't desire every day, so there's more to it than that.

I'm truly puzzled why you think this contributes to your argument.

[Sculptor1]

erratum:
Ignorance is not an argument against determinism. That is just a lack of information and understanding.
It could also be due to human having non-rational
motivations. What Galbraith and Keyes call "animal passions".

[Leontiskos]

But it surely does. Suppose you read Einstein and arrive at the conclusion, "E = mc^2". Now suppose the local news press blows up, covering the town in scraps of newspaper. Having left your window open, you come home to find "E = mc^2" on your desk. Does the former equation have the same import as the latter equation? Of course not, for one is the result of free reasoning and the other is the result of mere event-causality, and event-causality is impotent to bring forth truth or representation. Apart from freedom, reason, and intentionality, there is no meaning, representation, or experimentation.

"Mere event-causality" surely can bring forth the truth. A part of a glacier breaks off: The ice falls into the sea (a demonstration of Newton´s law of gravity), the impact makes waves in the water, and so a chain of causalities follows... I see all those events as predictable, therefore repeatable - which brings us back to scientific research - we call it true because it is repeatable (if anyone were to recreate such experiments, then the same things would happen). I see all the events which follow the impact of the ice as true.
If truth is something we find, not create, then it would only be natural that truth would be found if we followed it´s causal footsteps, either into the future or past.

Truth is not that which is repeatable. I don't think any philosophers have ever claimed such a thing. Truth is a correspondence of reality with a mind. Without mind-dependent representations, there is no truth. Events happen, but they don't represent, and hence they cannot be true or false. We call those representations 'propositions', and propositions have the unique ability to be either true or false. Events have no such ability; only propositions about events, made by free and rational minds, have that ability.

[Wardwatcher]

But it surely does. Suppose you read Einstein and arrive at the conclusion, "E = mc^2". Now suppose the local news press blows up, covering the town in scraps of newspaper. Having left your window open, you come home to find "E = mc^2" on your desk. Does the former equation have the same import as the latter equation? Of course not, for one is the result of free reasoning and the other is the result of mere event-causality, and event-causality is impotent to bring forth truth or representation. Apart from freedom, reason, and intentionality, there is no meaning, representation, or experimentation.

"Mere event-causality" surely can bring forth the truth. A part of a glacier breaks off: The ice falls into the sea (a demonstration of Newton´s law of gravity), the impact makes waves in the water, and so a chain of causalities follows... I see all those events as predictable, therefore repeatable - which brings us back to scientific research - we call it true because it is repeatable (if anyone were to recreate such experiments, then the same things would happen). I see all the events which follow the impact of the ice as true.
If truth is something we find, not create, then it would only be natural that truth would be found if we followed it´s causal footsteps, either into the future or past.

Truth is not that which is repeatable. I don't think any philosophers have ever claimed such a thing. Truth is a correspondence of reality with a mind. Without mind-dependent representations, there is no truth. Events happen, but they don't represent, and hence they cannot be true or false. We call those representations 'propositions', and propositions have the unique ability to be either true or false. Events have no such ability; only propositions about events, made by free and rational minds, have that ability.

No, only propostions about events made by RATIONAL, NOT FREE minds have that ability. You sneak in the word free into the end of many arguments you make, but you never make a case for usage of the word.

[Leontiskos]

Truth is not that which is repeatable. I don't think any philosophers have ever claimed such a thing. Truth is a correspondence of reality with a mind. Without mind-dependent representations, there is no truth. Events happen, but they don't represent, and hence they cannot be true or false. We call those representations 'propositions', and propositions have the unique ability to be either true or false. Events have no such ability; only propositions about events, made by free and rational minds, have that ability.

No, only propostions about events made by RATIONAL, NOT FREE minds have that ability. You sneak in the word free into the end of many arguments you make, but you never make a case for usage of the word.

If a mind is not able to freely consider a proposition and judge it true or false, then it is not rational. If the "judgment" is predetermined to either 'true' or 'false' then it is not a rational judgment at all.

[Wardwatcher]

Truth is not that which is repeatable. I don't think any philosophers have ever claimed such a thing. Truth is a correspondence of reality with a mind. Without mind-dependent representations, there is no truth. Events happen, but they don't represent, and hence they cannot be true or false. We call those representations 'propositions', and propositions have the unique ability to be either true or false. Events have no such ability; only propositions about events, made by free and rational minds, have that ability.

No, only propostions about events made by RATIONAL, NOT FREE minds have that ability. You sneak in the word free into the end of many arguments you make, but you never make a case for usage of the word.

If a mind is not able to freely consider a proposition and judge it true or false, then it is not rational. If the "judgment" is predetermined to either 'true' or 'false' then it is not a rational judgment at all.

There is no freedom in rationality. It is the opposite, rationality leaves no room for freedom - freedom gives you a multitude of choices, while there is only one direction in which you can go to get closer to truth, through rationality. As I said, we find truth, and we do so by experimentation, which allows us to follow the "footsteps of causality" - and there is only one path, so that automatically leaves no room for choice, hardly freedom. I don´t mean to be rude, but after this week-long conversation it starts to seem that you are incapable of grasping the concept of determinism fully or you refuse to.

[Leontiskos]

If a mind is not able to freely consider a proposition and judge it true or false, then it is not rational. If the "judgment" is predetermined to either 'true' or 'false' then it is not a rational judgment at all.

There is no freedom in rationality. It is the opposite, rationality leaves no room for freedom - freedom gives you a multitude of choices, while there is only one direction in which you can go to get closer to truth, through rationality. As I said, we find truth, and we do so by experimentation, which allows us to follow the "footsteps of causality" - and there is only one path, so that automatically leaves no room for choice, hardly freedom. I don´t mean to be rude, but after this week-long conversation it starts to seem that you are incapable of grasping the concept of determinism fully or you refuse to.

Rationality imposes constraints in some ways, but it also presupposes freedom in other ways. I gave arguments as to why it presupposes freedom, but you failed to address those arguments. Are you of the opinion, for example, that one could be rational while simultaneously being unable to freely consider a proposition and judge it true or false?

[thrasymachus]

LuckyR wrote
I converse with Determinists routinely and they typically say that the appearance of options is an illusion, thus the actual outcome is the only possible outcome thus it is not an "option", it was predetermined.

I find the concept far fetched, ie an overly convoluted "solution" to give them the result they prefer.

I would the matter is not so complicated. After all, causality as intuitive and modus ponens. The real approach to this lies not in trying to overturn this principle with counterexamples, which is pointless, but to pull back altogether and question the nature of epistemology itself: causality is first a knowledge claim before it starts to work on defining the way the world works. One must first understand the vulnerability of the thesis that affirms knowledge claims to be what we generally hold them to be, and this opens a new category of inquiry, and this is where determinism meets its match.

But the foundational intuition is not to be questioned. Just ask Wittgenstein.