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Photons, Quasars and the Possibility of Free Will

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Re: Photons, Quasars and the Possibility of Free Will

#161

Post by coldtea »

cthalupa wrote: post #116
naasking wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No need for the free will at all. You're mistaken. Free will is needed to identify who the criminal is in any given situation, ie. who are the morally responsible parties. You can't escape that with the arguments you presented, and you just skipped it to talk about justice, which is a whole separate matter.

>Free will is needed to identify who the criminal is in any given situation, No. Causality is all you need to identify who the criminal is. Physical stimuli are basically all we need as intelligent beings to come to a conclusion about things we don't like happening to us, and thus ultimately make into moral laws or codified ones. These are the inputs, these are the causes. Then, once enough human beings have had thos…

>No. Causality is all you need to identify who the criminal is.

Causality just determines who did something criminal. The word criminal though also invokes a moral judgement (of character) and intent, which presupposes an agent, which presupposes free will.

Re: Photons, Quasars and the Possibility of Free Will

#162

Post by coldtea »

naasking wrote: post #123
cthalupa wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Free will is needed to identify who the criminal is in any given situation, No. Causality is all you need to identify who the criminal is. Physical stimuli are basically all we need as intelligent beings to come to a conclusion about things we don't like happening to us, and thus ultimately make into moral laws or codified ones. These are the inputs, these are the causes. Then, once enough human beings have had thos…

> No. Causality is all you need to identify who the criminal is. Unfortunately not. If your gets car stolen, without free will, you can't assign responsibility to the "thief", because you yourself were a causal factor in your car getting stolen: had you parked somewhere else, your car wouldn't have been stolen. Had society or his parents better supported the "thief", he wouldn't have stolen that car. Had your city pl…

>Unfortunately not. If your gets car stolen, without free will, you can't assign responsibility to the "thief"

Actually you can. Or rather, without free will, you have no say on whether you can or cannot.

If the deterministic chain comes out so, you will assign responsibility to the thief, even if it has no meaning to do so.

Re: Photons, Quasars and the Possibility of Free Will

#163

Post by coldtea »

cthalupa wrote: post #132
naasking wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No. Causality is all you need to identify who the criminal is. Unfortunately not. If your gets car stolen, without free will, you can't assign responsibility to the "thief", because you yourself were a causal factor in your car getting stolen: had you parked somewhere else, your car wouldn't have been stolen. Had society or his parents better supported the "thief", he wouldn't have stolen that car. Had your city pl…

All of those things are true, and I don't need them to be untrue to assign the largest share of responsibility to the thief. Having laws (and the enforcement of laws) in place is something we believe to be the most effective input in causing the Bad Things to not happen. As such, having them and enforcing them is purely logical. We have decided that having someone "broken" in such a manner that these inputs are not e…

>Having laws (and the enforcement of laws) in place is something we believe to be the most effective input in causing the Bad Things to not happen. As such, having them and enforcing them is purely logical.

It's only logical assuming free willing agents making logical choices.

Else, it's only automatic and predetermined, like everything else.

>Either you have negative stimuli to it from something more direct, such as in my situation, or perhaps just because of social pressure and the desire to conform, but morality still comes into existence from the causal nature of reality.

No, it doesn't. Morality (as we understand it) only comes into existence if we assume a causal nature PLUS free agents (not totally bound to that causal nature).

Else, there's no morality to a murder anymore than there's a morality to the formation of Earth. Both are events destined to do by the initial state of the universe in the big bang.

Re: Photons, Quasars and the Possibility of Free Will

#164

Post by naasking »

cthalupa wrote: post #152
naasking wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All of those things are true, and I don't need them to be untrue to assign the largest share of responsibility to the thief. You actually do. The very process of assigning "share of responsibility" is precisely the question that depends upon free will. If the thief stole your car only because someone was holding his wife hostage, now where does the responsibility lie? The circumstances immediately surrounding the c…

>If the thief stole your car only because someone was holding his wife hostage, now where does the responsibility lie? Still with the thief. He still has all of the other inputs into his system beyond just the fact that someone kidnapped his wife. Believing that causality ultimately determines every decision we make doesn't mean that I believe that it's a simple one to one mapping. He knows he can call the police - t…

> He knows he can call the police - this isn't an action movie, and he's not the characters Jason Statham plays. If he is the characters Jason Statham plays, well, it doesn't really matter because he's not going to be caught anyway, and I'm left railing against the hypothetical thief that more often matches reality than your car getting stolen by the living embodiment of an action movie hero/anti-hero.

You're evading the question. The point of moral dilemmas is to highlight the qualities that meaningfully affect the outcome. We have here two scenarios, one in which the thief would be held responsible, and one in which he would not. Free will easily distinguishes these two scenarios, and since you claim we don't need free will to make such judgments, let's hear how you distinguish these.

Re: Photons, Quasars and the Possibility of Free Will

#165

Post by naasking »

coldtea wrote: post #162
naasking wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No. Causality is all you need to identify who the criminal is. Unfortunately not. If your gets car stolen, without free will, you can't assign responsibility to the "thief", because you yourself were a causal factor in your car getting stolen: had you parked somewhere else, your car wouldn't have been stolen. Had society or his parents better supported the "thief", he wouldn't have stolen that car. Had your city pl…

> Unfortunately not. If your gets car stolen, without free will, you can't assign responsibility to the "thief" Actually you can. Or rather, without free will, you have no say on whether you can or cannot. If the deterministic chain comes out so, you will assign responsibility to the thief, even if it has no meaning to do so.

> If the deterministic chain comes out so, you will assign responsibility to the thief, even if it has no meaning to do so.

I describe a contrasting scenario further down the thread with the other poster, where the thief is now compelled to steal your car because his wife was taken hostage. Responsibility for stealing your car lies with the thief in one scenario but not the other. How would you make this distinction without free will?

Re: Photons, Quasars and the Possibility of Free Will

#166

Post by coldtea »

ajuc wrote: post #153
naasking wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All of those things are true, and I don't need them to be untrue to assign the largest share of responsibility to the thief. You actually do. The very process of assigning "share of responsibility" is precisely the question that depends upon free will. If the thief stole your car only because someone was holding his wife hostage, now where does the responsibility lie? The circumstances immediately surrounding the c…

> How would you differentiate these two scenarios without free will? Circumstances change the moral evaluation of actions, it doesn't matter if it was a blackmail, or a hurricane (which doesn't have a free will) - still people would be more lenient on the guy that stole a car to save his wife. And the guy still made a choice (or had the illusion of making a choice), just with different circumstances. And still the ex…

>still people would be more lenient on the guy that stole a car to save his wife

No, people will be just as lenient as their puppet like automatic responses to chains of events created at the Big Bang dictate. All of those being set in stone in advance.

>If the free will doesn't exist - people can still evaluate what is good and bad using the concept of free will.

Evaluate means a process that examines the facts and can come into this or that result. But without free will (in pure determinism) there's no this or that result: just whatever is destined to be. Even the term "evaluation" is bogus, it's just an automatic reflex.

>Some people use the concept of God to define morality after all, and it certainly possible (s)he doesn't exist.

Which would make their morality meaningless. And so would the non-existence of free will.

Re: Photons, Quasars and the Possibility of Free Will

#167

Post by coldtea »

bad_user wrote: post #136
davemp wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the universe is deterministic, then we are just a bunch of atoms reacting predictably to external forces, making us not very different from rocks. No. This is very disingenuous. We are a beautifully ordered, continuously changing, unlikely set of atoms with history and the ability to affect / finely order huge amounts of other atoms. We're much better and more interesting than rocks! :) (No offense to anyone who…

I'm not talking about what's interesting or not in the universe. I'm saying that compatibilism basically says that rocks too have free will. Which makes the term meaningless. I mean, if you think about it, rocks too can suffer grinding due to their environment, having their shape, size or texture changed, which will affect what "choices" they'll make in the future and all rocks are unique in the universe due to their…

>So in regards to a "free will" discussion, the only difference between us and rocks is what? That we are living organisms and thus can move around? So is an amoeba.

No, it's that we perceive our time-line-uniqueness as will (consciously) whereas rocks don't.

Re: Photons, Quasars and the Possibility of Free Will

#168

Post by naasking »

ajuc wrote: post #159
naasking wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a computer is able to hold a conversation about any topic, was able to understand and learn from its choices and explain its thought process leading up to a choice, then yes, it has free will. I have no doubt whatsoever that computer programs could have free will, even deterministic ones. The qualities that are relevant for free will simply have nothing to do with determinism.

You seem to define free will in a very strange way. It seems to me the words you are defining is consciousness and intelligence, and not free will? If I predict what you will ask and record the responses on a tape perfectly timed to your future questions, and then press play and leave it playing as you are asking questions - does this tape player have a free will? It seems to learn because it answers as if it learnt.

> You seem to define free will in a very strange way.

Rather, you are coming into this debate with certain assumptions about what "free will" means or what properties it must have. Most such assumptions have been invalidated over the past few centuries. The whole debate over free will is about defining what it means and what properties it has.

My position is that of Compatibilism, which is the same as that held by most philosophers on this question. It's "strange" only in the sense that people sometimes find it surprising that free will can be compatible with determinism.

> If I predict what you will ask and record the responses on a tape perfectly timed to your future questions, and then press play and leave it playing as you are asking questions - does this tape player have a free will? It seems to learn because it answers as if it learnt.

"Seems to" is not the same as "did". Also pointing out a bizarre outcome by assuming an impossible precondition, ie. predicting everything I will ask, is not a compelling argument.

Re: Photons, Quasars and the Possibility of Free Will

#169

Post by coldtea »

naasking wrote: post #141
davemp wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll go poll the world and get back to you to see if you align ;)

Already been done. They do not: https://philpapers.org/rec/ANDWCI-3

Or so says a paper. Assuming no methodological errors and replication, in which Psychology (this being posted in "Philosophical Psychology" is a very bad culprit, and stats/polls even more so).

Re: Photons, Quasars and the Possibility of Free Will

#170

Post by furgooswft13 »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #158

I thought this experiment was explained just as well by decoherence? Under the many world interpretation, there's no instant communication, or hidden variable, we just happen to learn in which world we are by performing the measurement. The laws of physics are still deterministic as far as I can tell.

This just pushes back the point of non-determinism. Instead of the measurement, or wave function collapse, or decoherence or whatever you want to call it being not deterministic, the "world" you end up in is.

If even that point is to be considered deterministic then there has to be some previous state of something to lead to it, and we're back to non-local hidden variables.

This is one of the many reasons I dislike the many-worlds theory, and it's seeming popularity of late. It does not actually solve non-determinism, it just shuffles the deck a little, while also tacking on an ever expanding number of alternate universes, all the while remaining as non-falsifiable as any other QM interpretation.

If I had to choose between two non-local hidden variable theories, I'd choose the one without the constant branching alternate worlds.

Non-local hidden variables are almost by definition unknowable to us, so I'm not sure what we gain by pretending all this meta-physical philosophizing is actual science. It did make for a good TNG episode though.

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