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The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion?

theguardian.com

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Re: The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion?

#11

Post by senectus1 »

dlkf wrote: post #10

> A growing chorus of scientists and philosophers argue that free will does not exist. This isn't _new_, this "chorus" has existed for so long that it used to be referred to exclusively as a "khoros." Secondly, it's totally embarrassing that the matter isn't considered settled. The standard argument against free will is sound. The closest thing to an objection you'll see is people moving the goalposts so far that we…

> The standard argument against free will is sound.

I must have missed that memo :-P

Re: The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion?

#12

Post by AndrewDucker »

A lot of these discussions start off badly by not agreeing a definition of Free Will.

It's a really really nebulous phrase, and that frequently leads to people talking past each other.

This comic illustrates things quite nicely: https://scienceandtheology.wordpress.com/2012/01/28/dilbert-...

Re: The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion?

#13

Post by zwkrt »

“That’s free will: were you to rewind the tape of world history, to the instant just before you made your decision, with everything in the universe exactly the same, you’d have been able to make a different one.”

Let me posit a different world view that resolved this dilemma: we live in a present moment which is always unfolding in a chaotic kaleidoscope. QM tells us as much, that we live in a world based on nonlocal probabilistic events and that we can’t ever “rewind”. Under such circumstances “free will” as conceived by a middle schooler doesn’t make sense, but determinism hardly does either.

Determinism brings to mind the idea of a roller-coaster-track of past-present-future. Physicists call this “eternalism”. Eternalism is great if you are calculating how a ball will behave at time t when thrown in a parabolic arc, but I really do believe that time t+1 and time t-1 doesn’t actually “exist”. We remember the past like ripples in a pond remembering the rock that fell in. We anticipate the future based on patterns we have stored up. But it hardly makes sense to say that the future is determined by the past other than to say that our concept of a future is informed by our ability to make inferences from the ephemeral memories we call “the past”.

Like most philosophical problems we let words get in the way of reality. “Could have done otherwise” sounds like a statement of fact but we only ever use it to express our own every-day thought experiments, or to express desire. “He could have taken a shorter route.” “She could have been nicer to me.” In reality neither thing happened differently because /now/ is when everything happens and we only get one shot. And that’s the crux of it to me. Talk of free will is mostly just anxiety over having made the right actions in the moment or not when mulling it over later. Certainly we have no future fate since the present has inflexible probability baked into it.

Re: The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion?

#14

Post by Shaddox »

I guess this explains why I feel so trapped. Like a pawn to my own circumstances.

To live life is to live in servitude. I'm a slave to my own needs of bread, water and circus. To supply this never-ending need I must serve someone else too. I must serve the needs of my family as well : they want and expect things out of me too. So where does that leave me? A never-ending cycle of busy-bodying. I can't even get mad or push back anymore. To what end? I'm simply a spectator to my own fate which unravels before me. If it wasn't me, it would have been someone else. Since it wasn't someone else, therefore, it has to be me. I am just a replaceable cog, but this cog still needs to be put to use in a machine.

This made me realize death is the true gift of God to mankind. An end to our seemingly never-ending drudgery.

Re: The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion?

#15

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

senectus1 wrote: post #11
dlkf wrote: post #10

> A growing chorus of scientists and philosophers argue that free will does not exist. This isn't _new_, this "chorus" has existed for so long that it used to be referred to exclusively as a "khoros." Secondly, it's totally embarrassing that the matter isn't considered settled. The standard argument against free will is sound. The closest thing to an objection you'll see is people moving the goalposts so far that we…

> The standard argument against free will is sound. I must have missed that memo :-P

The universe has planted a few sceptics to liven things up.

Re: The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion?

#16

Post by kefabean »

kanzenryu2 wrote: post #6
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #2

is the clockwork universe provable?

Quantum theory disproves it

> It’s true that since Laplace’s day, findings in quantum physics have indicated that some events, at the level of atoms and electrons, are genuinely random, which means they would be impossible to predict in advance, even by some hypothetical megabrain.

> But few people involved in the free will debate think that makes a critical difference. Those tiny fluctuations probably have little relevant impact on life at the scale we live it, as human beings.

Free will or no free will, is not the assumption in point 2 fundamentally flawed?

Quantum mechanics is surely at the heart of all interactions and so at some level is responsible for the ‘illusion’ making any difference between free will and predetermination unknowable.

Re: The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion?

#18

Post by danbruc »

senectus1 wrote: post #11
dlkf wrote: post #10

> A growing chorus of scientists and philosophers argue that free will does not exist. This isn't _new_, this "chorus" has existed for so long that it used to be referred to exclusively as a "khoros." Secondly, it's totally embarrassing that the matter isn't considered settled. The standard argument against free will is sound. The closest thing to an objection you'll see is people moving the goalposts so far that we…

> The standard argument against free will is sound. I must have missed that memo :-P

Just try to define what free will actually means and see things fall apart. The entire idea of free will makes no sense to begin with if one thinks clearly about it.

Re: The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion?

#19

Post by jakobnissen »

dlkf wrote: post #10

> A growing chorus of scientists and philosophers argue that free will does not exist. This isn't _new_, this "chorus" has existed for so long that it used to be referred to exclusively as a "khoros." Secondly, it's totally embarrassing that the matter isn't considered settled. The standard argument against free will is sound. The closest thing to an objection you'll see is people moving the goalposts so far that we…

The debate between "no free will" and "magical supernatural free will" is silly and pointless, and yes, it should have been settled long time ago.

But it bugs me that so many people are eager so claim that because magical free will doesn't exist, that means no free will can exist. Compatibilism is not a new idea either. The usual argument is that compatibilists are moving the goal posts, but I simply don't understand that argument.

Suppose an argument between two sided: "Bigfoot exists" versus "no non-human apes exists". Is it moving the goalposts to point to gorillas?

Or suppose we're in the 1700's, and people are discussing vitalism: The force that separates dead things from living. The two sides debate whether the "vital spark" exists, or whether life is an illusion and it's meaningless to talk about living things at all. Is it moving the goal posts to try to find a non-magical definition of life?

To me it's pretty clear that we have free will, and that has nothing to do with determinism.

Re: The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion?

#20

Post by dusted »

I've always done what I did because, while other options existed for my agency to persue, I didn't chose them, I chose what I did, and so at that time, was the only possible choice I could make, obviously, since it was what I made, it was what my entire life here on earth had set me up to chose continues arguing around the same cirle forever

Quantum theory is probably not going to save us from this, even if it at some point is fully and entirely proven and understood in a grand unified field theory. Even if something is not deterministic, does not mean that the thing is "will" or even a part of it.

Even on a macroscopic scale we can have unpredictable events, at least practically unpredictable ones, which can change our behavior, but that's just it, external events chainging our internal state. For all I know, a high energy particle may once every so often hit one of my synapses, changing its chargs just-so, making me decide to opt for the smaller menu at Mc.Donalds.

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