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A delightful quirk of relativity theory

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Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#101

Post by vidarh »

kybernetikos wrote: post #45
danbruc wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rescuing free-will from the jaws of spacetime would be cool! Free will does not exist. It is logically inconsistent. Either your choice is some function of your current state and the environment you are in, then the choice is not free, or it is independent of your current state and the environment you are in, then it is not your choice in any meaningful way, it is just the result of a coin flip. You can do some menta…

You've put the dilemma nicely - it can't be both 'free' and 'your will' by your definitions (well, without admitting supernatural beings that can affect and be affected by the natural world, but are not part of it). Personally I'm happy with other definitions, not because I feel I'm doing mental gymnastics, but because the version you give is clearly not what normal people mean by it when they refer to it. It might w…

> Personally I'm happy with other definitions, not because I feel I'm doing mental gymnastics, but because the version you give is clearly not what normal people mean by it when they refer to it. It might well be related to what philosophers argue about, but normal people who offer you a 'free choice' or who say that you did something 'of your own free will' do not mean anything like 'your choice was not a function of the state of the universe'.

There's certainly a duality here where it's fine to talk about people having choices even if one strictly believe they don't, but my experience is that if anything people tend to often get exasperated or outright agitated if you try to question to what extent their decisions are free. A whole lot of human society is organised around the idea that we have agency and that we're the product of choices we've made of our own volition.

E.g. if you genuinely believe the notion that we have free will is nonsense (and I do), then the logical extension is to be very uncomfortable with the notion of e.g. prison used for vengeance or anything at all other than to the bare minimal extent required to protect others, because the logical conclusion of thinking people don't have agency is that there was no way other than other external stimuli in their lives that they could have come out making other decisions.

It's a very uncomfortable thing to view society through a lens of seeing free will as an illusion. But it's also very hard to unsee the lack of any kind of coherent theory of free will that could justify anything else.

The reality is that if you actually talk to people about this, you'll quickly find that most people go through life with a very strong belief that they have agency and that people around them have agency, but the moment you start to question what that belief is based on, the basis for it tends to start to crumble very, very quickly. As I've said elsewhere, in decades of discussing this subject I've never seen someone come up with a definition of "free will" that still looks either "free" or like "will" under scrutiny. Usually you end up with people trying variations of arguments that just leads to infinite regress (e.g. arguing our soul gives us free will, at which point the question just shifts to a definition soul that would give it agency).

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#102

Post by bmitc »

irthomasthomas wrote: post #21

This would be more fun in a blog post. Twitter is a fucking horrible format for a complex analysis of special relativity. That aside, my favourite quirk from relativity is this: "The more you move in space, the less you move in time." Like relativity in general, it sounds simple enough, but it's consequences are profoundly shocking. (That is, if you take the time to understand it, and don't leap to the conclusion tha…

Maybe subtle, but shouldn't this be:

> "The more you [are observed to] move in space, the less you [are observed to] move in time."

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#103

Post by time_to_smile »

whatshisface wrote: post #97
time_to_smile wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can even leave out the 'physics' part there. "Free will" is a very poorly defined concept that mostly falls out of problems with theodicy in early moral philosophy. Since the idea of "free will" plays a major role in Christian ethics this notion has permeated a huge amount of the Western intellectual tradition, but only makes sense in the framework of other archaic philosophical questions around theodicy like "if…

Free will might be hard to define but it has plenty of very well-defined corollaries. For example, if there is such a thing as free will, it would not be possible to reliably predict a human being's actions in advance.

> not be possible to reliably predict a human being's actions in advance.

That's also true for purely deterministic systems. Basically any complex deterministic system (and quite a few relatively simple ones) you very quickly get to a point where you can't predict future behavior.

On top of that, showing exactly the issues with metaphysical "free will", this corollary has a lot of constraints that are also poorly defined. For example if a person's behavior were entirely unpredictable (i.e. completely random) we would also say that they don't have free will. Therefore there is only a subset of unpredictable behaviors we would say follow from free will but that subset is just as tricky to pin down as the notion of free will itself.

"Free will" only makes sense in a particular moral world view with plenty of axioms most people would agree don't hold for them.

It's also worth clarifying that "free will" only becomes problematic to define in when it is posed as a metaphysical issue. We clearly have very useful, practical definitions of free will such as not holding people accountable for doing something when held at gun point.

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#104

Post by vidarh »

awb wrote: post #75
antattack wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your definition of free will existed, how would you prove it?

Exactly. Free will (or lack thereof) is an untestable theory, better categorized as a thought experiment or philosophical debate.

Free will isn't a theory before someone comes up with an actual definition. That is the problem. I keep asking people for a definition, and the outcomes are generally either "smoke and mirrors" (complexity hiding something not at all "free"), appeal to a "soul" which just leads to infinite regress, or failure to even try.

Without someone willing to actually define what they mean, the discussion is moot - it makes no sense to claim that an undefined concept exists.

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#105

Post by jasperry »

cjameskeller wrote: post #69
danbruc wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rescuing free-will from the jaws of spacetime would be cool! Free will does not exist. It is logically inconsistent. Either your choice is some function of your current state and the environment you are in, then the choice is not free, or it is independent of your current state and the environment you are in, then it is not your choice in any meaningful way, it is just the result of a coin flip. You can do some menta…

This is conflating causation and determination. It is true that one's choice must have a cause, and this can either be internal or external to oneself. But it is not true that the choice must be _determined_ by the cause. The Agent Causation [0] view denies the notion that only states or events can serve as causal priors, and instead asserts that substances themselves may be the terminal "cause" [0] https://plato.sta…

What is a substance? Does it have a definition in any testable theory?

You claim that causation and determination were conflated, but if the distinction between them depends on terms that can't be defined scientifically, then you haven't shown that they are different in what they refer to in the universe. It's conceivable that on a physical level causality is just a word for a property of a deterministic system.

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#106

Post by whatshisface »

time_to_smile wrote: post #103
whatshisface wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free will might be hard to define but it has plenty of very well-defined corollaries. For example, if there is such a thing as free will, it would not be possible to reliably predict a human being's actions in advance.

> not be possible to reliably predict a human being's actions in advance. That's also true for purely deterministic systems. Basically any complex deterministic system (and quite a few relatively simple ones) you very quickly get to a point where you can't predict future behavior. On top of that, showing exactly the issues with metaphysical "free will", this corollary has a lot of constraints that are also poorly def…

The difference between quickly getting to a point where you can't forecast the weather, and the fact that you can't predict wavefunction collapse at all, is significant on a more than metaphysical level. Figuring out which bucket human beings fall in to is a legitimate question.

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#107

Post by vidarh »

stared wrote: post #56
irthomasthomas wrote: post #21

This would be more fun in a blog post. Twitter is a fucking horrible format for a complex analysis of special relativity. That aside, my favourite quirk from relativity is this: "The more you move in space, the less you move in time." Like relativity in general, it sounds simple enough, but it's consequences are profoundly shocking. (That is, if you take the time to understand it, and don't leap to the conclusion tha…

A real paradox is if you can reach two mutually-exclusive conclusions. In the special relativity theory, the order of events depends on the frame of reference. It is not much unlike 2D space if something is left or right to each other depending on a rotation. "I don't like how does the special relativity/quantum physics works" is not a paradox on its own. In this case, it just challenges our pedestrian view of time.

It's a paradox in the same sense that Zeno's paradox is. As in "if we assume the world is how we intuit it to be without thinking it through and having the proper understanding, this problem seems self-contradictory" rather than in the sense of something actually self-contradictory.

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#108

Post by awb »

vidarh wrote: post #91
awb wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few issues with the “free will” debate. 1) Define “free” 2) How do you test your hypothesis? You’re trying to apply logic to an untestable philosophical debate. If you believe free will doesn’t exist, you can’t design an experiment that would invalidate that belief. And if your theory is untestable and unfalsifiable, then what good is it other than a creative exercise? However, we do know from Quantum Mechanics tha…

> You’re trying to apply logic to an untestable philosophical debate. If you believe free will doesn’t exist, you can’t design an experiment that would invalidate that belief. And if your theory is untestable and unfalsifiable, then what good is it other than a creative exercise? This is reversing the burden of proof. The issue with "free will" is getting those who think there is a meaningful "free will" concept to a…

> This is reversing the burden of proof.

No, in response to someone vaguely mentioning the words “free will”, you made the claim: “Free will does not exist.”

The burden of proof is now on you to provide evidence of your claim as well as on you to define the terms contained within your claim.

I am not arguing the “free will” debate either way for the reasons mentioned previously and do not care to define the terms as the entire debate is nothing more than a creative thought experiment as far as I can tell.

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#109

Post by vidarh »

irthomasthomas wrote: post #73
irthomasthomas wrote: post #21

This would be more fun in a blog post. Twitter is a fucking horrible format for a complex analysis of special relativity. That aside, my favourite quirk from relativity is this: "The more you move in space, the less you move in time." Like relativity in general, it sounds simple enough, but it's consequences are profoundly shocking. (That is, if you take the time to understand it, and don't leap to the conclusion tha…

If you think about this in the quantum-mechanical framework, it appears to contradict this free-will problem. In relativity, reality is a solid block, and future events are as immutable as past (no free-will). But in QM this statement would be expressing a level of certainty which violates the measurement problem and Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle. In Penrose's recent book he posits an interesting hypothesis on t…

To me the main reason quantum effects does not affect the free will argument is because one can - and probably should given that otherwise it makes QM keep coming up -, reframe it to not worry about absolute determinism and instead apply just probabilistic models.

The real question becomes one of probabilities: Unless some entity is able to introduce measurable biases that deviates from predictable probabilistic distributions relative to what could be predicted based on its complete state (including its internal physical structure) and complete inputs, it makes little sense to suggest the entity has agency.

But that leaves us with the problem of explaining how something could effectively break the laws of physics in a way that doesn't just lead to infinite regress.

The day I see someone give a definition of free will that overcomes that, I'll be in awe. Not holding my breath.

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#110

Post by syki »

danbruc wrote: post #71
michalf6 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>call it free if the choice is not computable in advance Is it not essentially equivalent to "actual" free will? I am perfectly happy with just this.

You are free to call this free will, I would not. For a good hash function there is no way of predicting the output for a given input besides executing the hash function. But I don't see why I would call the output free. If there is no better way to figure out what you will do than letting your brain go through its internal calculations, fine, your behavior is unpredictable, but how is it free?

Your points are well stated and succinctly out. They’ve made me think about this issue more than I ever have. It’s not a question I’ve ever been interested in but I like the reasoning you are giving.

The first sentence above though helps to illustrate a problem when thinking about this stuff. You wrote, You are free to…. From your perspective no one has that freedom but our everyday experience is such that it’s hard to really follow through with this belief. Perhaps consciousness and self awareness comes at a cost of not being able to fully embrace the notion that we don’t have free will. It certainly feels like I have exercised free will but that is likely just an illusion.

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