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What Life Means to Einstein (1929) [pdf]

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Re: What Life Means to Einstein (1929) [pdf]

#61

Post by tengbretson »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #4
vargr616 wrote: post #3

whenever people say that modern journalists are bad and nobody knows how to write anymore, i'll show them this article

You mean that it is just as bad if not more, right? Because it is making Einstein out to be some sort of rebel like who wants things to be "relative" as if it is a religion or philosophy of some sort. Relativity is just what he discovered, not some ideology he set out to prove or invented. Then the author goes on to try and apply this relativity to all aspects of the world, try to make puns on it despite Einstein spe…

I think describing Einstein as having a love affair with things being relative is accurate.

Re: What Life Means to Einstein (1929) [pdf]

#62

Post by The_Colonel »

lazystar wrote: post #49
layer8 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It probably depends on what you mean by free will. People who disagree about determinism and/or compatibilism usually can’t agree on a common definition of free will either. Your Einstein quote above doesn’t necessarily deny free will.

in the article, Einstein is firm regarding his belief that there is no free will. there are many other quotes in the article to choose from. anyway, my own view is that ones belief or disbeleif in free will is predetermined - if one could predict the path of every atom and molecule in the galaxy from the start of time until now, theyd be able to predict what choices a random person would make before the person had de…

What you're describing is physical determinism which is related but not equivalent to the question of free will.

Compatibilism is a belief that physical determinism and free will are compatible - e. g. it is predetermined that you will read this article, but it's still an act of free will.

Re: What Life Means to Einstein (1929) [pdf]

#63

Post by The_Colonel »

hirvi74 wrote: post #42
PunchTornado wrote: post #29

I am surprised to find out that Einstein was so convinced in the non-existence of free will. > I claim credit for nothing. Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect, as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player. Meanwhile, I b…

> determinist and believe in free will. Do you care to elaborate more? I am genuinely curious about your opinions. Have you read/listened to any of Dr. Robert Sapolsky's material on free will? I am curious what you think of his position on the matter.

Not the op, but I will give it a shot. Free will relates to identity - there needs to be someone exercising the free will. So, what am I? I identify as the whole physical system of my body and especially my brain. The neurons, their connections, the atoms, the laws governing the interactions. I think people rejecting free will are considering physics to be some kind of external harness, constraint on themselves. But in my view, physics permeates my body. There's no myself without the physics (be it deterministic or not), it's an inseparable part of my system, ergo myself. In a deterministic universe, my thoughts and actions are driven by the configuration of matter, energy and physics in my body. But all of that is me.

Re: What Life Means to Einstein (1929) [pdf]

#64

Post by AQuantized »

PunchTornado wrote: post #29

I am surprised to find out that Einstein was so convinced in the non-existence of free will. > I claim credit for nothing. Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect, as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player. Meanwhile, I b…

Einstein was enamored with the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Spinoza, in Schopenhauer's conception of the will and Spinoza's pantheism. The God of Spinoza (or indeed Einstein) is strictly deterministic, and we are all a part of such a God, as is all of nature. Hence his quote 'God does not play dice', and in part it explains Einstein's philosophical commitment against some of the indeterministic interpretations of quantum physics being ultimately true.

Re: What Life Means to Einstein (1929) [pdf]

#65

Post by WalterBright »

mhh__ wrote: post #56
WalterBright wrote: post #54

The thing about Einstein is he did not discover that gravity bent space and then produced a theory to explain it. He predicted it. The proof came decades later, and his prediction was dead on target. It changed everything.

Decades? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddington_experiment

You're right, I thought the confirmation wasn't till much later!

Re: What Life Means to Einstein (1929) [pdf]

#66

Post by melagonster »

keiferski wrote: post #23
laGrenouille wrote: post #18

> His fame may outlive Foch and Ludendorff, Wilson and Clemenceau. Funny to think how this has aged since 1915. Over a century later Einstein is an almost universally known figure. The others on this list are, particularly outside of France, names that I would not expect the median person to be able to say something interesting about.

I wonder how much of this ultimately comes down to branding. Einstein has a memorable name, a memorable haircut/photograph, and also managed to have his name become a byword for “genius.”

On the other hand, he is the last scientist who was treated as a superstar. There is no other person who can reach the same degree of his reputation.

Re: What Life Means to Einstein (1929) [pdf]

#67

Post by sickblastoise »

hirvi74 wrote: post #42
PunchTornado wrote: post #29

I am surprised to find out that Einstein was so convinced in the non-existence of free will. > I claim credit for nothing. Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect, as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player. Meanwhile, I b…

> determinist and believe in free will. Do you care to elaborate more? I am genuinely curious about your opinions. Have you read/listened to any of Dr. Robert Sapolsky's material on free will? I am curious what you think of his position on the matter.

Imagine you were to pause and take an exact carbon copy of the exact physical state of the universe in the current moment. When you press play in both universes, both universes will play out the exact same way into the end of time, and you would never be able to tell the two apart. That is determinism.

If the universe were not deterministic, for reasons like non-deterministic physics, souls existing, etc. you would potentially see difference between the two as they played out separately.

Another way to think about determinism vs non-determinism is that if something is deterministic, then if you have perfect information about it, you can predict it’s future states exactly. On the flip side, if something is non deterministic, no matter how much information you gather about it, you will never be able to exactly predict its future states (only probabilistically).

Einstein is not so subtly telling us “god doesn’t play dice”, that there are no random physical properties of the universe, and that magic (like souls) doesn’t exist, in his opinion.

Free will means we have a choice in what we do next, but if we go and examine your carbon copy in the other universe you will see they did all of the same things you did. Furthermore if we were granted perfect information about the universe and had a good enough gpu, we could from the physical principles of the universe predict the future state of everything in the universe until the end of time, including all of your future choices, hence no free will.

My thoughts are that people are mixing up the human concept of free will — freedom to make decisions based on how you feel and what you know - with determinism, that the first state of all matter in the universe determined all future states of the universe, and that these are inevitable. The fallacy is that free will in the sense of determinism is only important to human decision making if we have perfect information about the current state of the universe, which we don’t - so until we do, we have to keep guessing what happens next.

Re: What Life Means to Einstein (1929) [pdf]

#68

Post by thadk »

If you're curious about the point early in the article "Can there be any permanent value or any absolute truth in the world in which the three angles of the triangle have ceased to be equal to two right angles- in a world in which time itself has lost its meaning, in which infinity become so finite, and the finite is lost in the infinite?" there's more at: https://meaningness.com/collapse-of-rational-certainty

Re: What Life Means to Einstein (1929) [pdf]

#69

Post by ahazred8ta »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #4
vargr616 wrote: post #3

whenever people say that modern journalists are bad and nobody knows how to write anymore, i'll show them this article

You mean that it is just as bad if not more, right? Because it is making Einstein out to be some sort of rebel like who wants things to be "relative" as if it is a religion or philosophy of some sort. Relativity is just what he discovered, not some ideology he set out to prove or invented. Then the author goes on to try and apply this relativity to all aspects of the world, try to make puns on it despite Einstein spe…

Einstein initially wanted to emphasize the 'invariance' aspect, used Invarianz-Theorie in correspondence, and said about the proliferation of 'relativity': "I admit that it is unfortunate and has given rise to philosophical misunderstandings."
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