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A delightful quirk of relativity theory

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Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#161
post #110
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I also behave and talk all day long as if we have free will, it's just a useful abstraction. But my world view will not shatter if someone puts me into an MRI machine and tells me what I will choose for dinner later that day.

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So, perhaps the better question is: Does it serve you better to believe there is free will or no free will? And leave it at that. From a pragmatic analysis the answer is pretty straightforward[1] (Spoiler, believing in free will is better if you value moral behaviour). Glad I chose to believe in free will! [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9280.200...

I don't think that would be the best option. There is nothing wrong with figuring out that we don't have true free will - however you want to define it - and still behave in everyday life as if we have it. It might just be a useful abstraction.

The study I linked indicates that people who don't believe in free will act as if they don't, granted, they weren't warned of the dangers of believing they don't so there might be more to explore.

But the question seems to me more about pragmatism vs realism than pragmatism vs. realism with 'some beliefs-as-if'. I find realism unsatisfying philosophically because we can see historical beliefs being so off the mark that we'd have to live in a pretty special time to have anything close to a realistic model of the universe, I think making good predictions is simply the best tool that we have. If that comes at the cost of having a single internally-consistent model of the universe, that's unfortunate, but at least I'm not attached to the wrong one. So if my belief in free will and my belief in Newtonian Mechanics are incompatible, that's not such a big deal to me as a pragmatist. In fact it's a useful feature of the metaphysics, since the places they come into conflict give an idea of where they're incomplete.

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#163
post #42

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…

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…

First, even constrained choices can be meaningful. Just because I can't choose to fly by flapping my arms, wouldn't mean I don't have free will. If free will exists, I can still choose among the options available to me. I don't think anyone operates by the definition of "free will" that you seem to be proposing. Free will is the ability to select from among the options you are given. The opposite of that would be that you'd always make the same pick every time, because your decisions are actually the results of forces acting upon you. If you had the choice between red, green, and blue; you'd choose red every time if we could rerun your life up to that moment in time.

Which is what makes the question kind of unknowable. Because we can't rerun our lives to see if we could make different decisions with all of the exact same conditions as before. Even running the choice twice isn't the same. Because the second time you do it, you're now a person who has previously made this choice. And that makes the scenario different, because you are different. We have no real way of testing free will.

But better still: the question does not matter at all.

Either free will exists or it doesn't. There's no spectrum of "50% will" or whatever. You can either make choices or you're essentially the result of all the forces acting upon you.

So, what are the consequences of both scenarios?

If free will exists, then fine, we can make choices. We can choose to do whatever. There's nothing really interesting to be said about this branch.

However. If free will does not exist, then there's something weird going on. Because if free will does not exist, I don't have any choice in whether or not to post this message. I post this message because your post elicits that response in me. Just like you made your post for the same reason. And we just keep pulling this thread all the way back to the big bang.

But we also don't have the choice in how we feel about this discussion either. You will either accept this or not based on the various physical, biological, and chemical processes going on inside of and around you. So you will either agree or disagree and that decision itself is preordained. Regardless if it is true or not. You're either the type to believe in free will or not and you can't choose that. Because if you could choose that, you'd have free will.

Even if you believe you are making a change, you're not. Because you were going to make that change due to the forces at work on you. Forces that were eventually going to interact with you because those forces themselves are the products of other forces, etc. So if you hear all this, take it to heart, and decide to live a life of apathy because you have no free will and nothing matters. Then that's what was going to happen at this point and time regardless.

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#164
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…

However, we do know from Quantum Mechanics that the universe is probabilistic and not deterministic That is not true, quantum mechanics - more specifically the Schrödinger equation - is deterministic. What is not deterministic is the wave function collapse but that is also incompatible with the Schrödinger equation because it implies non-unitary evolution of the wave function. And we have - as far as I know - no real…

From the article:

> One of the key implications of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is that it highlights the probabilistic nature of the universe

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#166
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free will just cannot be described by physics. This is very similar to the perception of the time flow. Time in physics is static. There is no now. Surely one can plug any time value into physical equations, but that will not explain, for example, why when we look at a thrown ball, we perceive a movement, and not, say the whole trajectory of the ball at the same time. And given that the free will and now are connecte…

Pardon, but your argument does not appear to be coherent. Your example in particular does not seem connected to your thesis in any way. I would suggest reformulating an argument that does not depend on a hazy refutation of physics.

Time in physics is similar to the number of a frame in video. For example, from two frames of a video of a thrown ball one can deduce the its whole trajectory. But it does now explain why when we see the video we see ball's movement. In a sense from a physical point of view the whole trajectory exists at once, there is nothing special about a particular point of a trajectory. There is no now.

Now back to the freedom of will. Its feeling originates in now as if it exists, it is about changing the future following the now. But since the notion of now is not reflected in physical equations, those cannot describe the freedom of will. In physics the whole timeline exists at the same time. In other words time is static and future has already happen. Thus there is literally no choice in physics.

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#167
post #4

I love the name of the scientist Al Unapietra. The thing is very well explained, but it's very sad to see it as a twitter thread, which is a mostly unreadable format.

Some people prefer it, and there's tools for those that don't. Such as [0], as another user so helpfully posted, and for which I am grateful, since I fall into the latter camp with you.

[0] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1482811504424542211.html

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#168

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…

> Twitter is a fucking horrible format for a complex analysis of special relativity. Keep in mind that regular people can and have simply replied to the theoretical physicist who posted it and received replies helping them understand better. In this sense it’s a fantastic medium. The same magic that keeps reliably producing spectacular “ah, actually I have a phd in the thing you’re arguing with me about” moments is a…

I've found that people also respond to thoughtful comments on blogs.

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, we do know from Quantum Mechanics that the universe is probabilistic and not deterministic: This is not true, and there are consistent interpretations of QM that are fully deterministic (many worlds, superdeterminism, pilot wave). Still, probabilistic vs deterministic makes no difference. There is no free will in a throw of the dice, and no free will in the wave function collapse. On the other hand, the ma…

I find the most satisfying version of compatibilism one where an agent is mostly determined by 'state' (genes/experiences etc), but the subjective experience of expending mental effort (e.g. when overcoming an addiction) is the agent nudging the wave function collapse this way or that. Add in the ability to influence future 'states' and one has a model much more consistent with the subjective experience of making dif…

Or you can just accept that reductive materialism is not an adequate description of the world.

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#170
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

> if you genuinely believe the notion that we have free will is nonsense (and I do)

Then you need to genuinely accept that you're not right, you're not making a cogent argument, you're just a fly buzzing around a giant turd.

Or rather you don't, cause you can't.

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