Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A delightful quirk of relativity theory

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 232 posts

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#211

Post by astrange »

JackFr wrote: post #169
SuoDuanDao wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does your non-materialist theory involve true randomness (which is not really making a decision), or is it just more mind-stuff behaving deterministically in another dimension (which is not really free will)?

I'm not sure there are alternatives to these.

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#212

Post by astrange »

d-d wrote: post #28
doctoboggan wrote: post #15

I like this, but it doesn't completely remove the "unintuitivenes" of relativity. For example, why do we measure in fractions of light speed? What happens when we are already rotated all the way to light speed and then fire another bullet? I guess there are other ways to reason about this, but it still doesn't feel intuitive to me.

Quoted post unavailable.

The GPS people would be surprised to hear that.

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#213

Post by tsimionescu »

astrange wrote: post #211
JackFr wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Does your non-materialist theory involve true randomness (which is not really making a decision), or is it just more mind-stuff behaving deterministically in another dimension (which is not really free will)? I'm not sure there are alternatives to these.

I think the standard position of free will non-compatibilists is that there is some dimension of mind whose future at any time T is not uniquely determined by its state at time T-1 (but it is influenced by that state, it's also not purely random). In this model, each agent possessing free will has a series of possible choices with "weights" for each choice pre-determined by the prior state of the agent (their history, their racial instincts etc). Which choice the agent will select cannot be known in advance. Usually it is implied that the agent has a resource of "will" that they must expend more of to select one of the choices with higher "weight". After the agent selects one particular choice, the universe proceeds deterministically (or probabilistically) until the next moment when an agent must make a choice. Whether this phenomenon is happening directly in material reality (the agent can influence wave function collapse or some other such idea) or it is happening in a separate world of mind/spirit and then there is some miraculous reconciliation of the two worlds is somewhat irrelevant.

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#214

Post by stevenhuang »

JackFr wrote: post #209
stevenhuang wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe this kind of response is exactly the defensive, strongly held belief sort as mentioned by OP. What, specifically, is not cogent about his argument? I think you'll find that if you think about it rationally, there really is no other conclusion without invoking mysticism.

I suppose I have two points. First is that while an argument is being made, absent subjective agency on his part he is no more than a candle flame illuminating the room. The candle once lit must illuminate - it cannot do anything else. And so I grant in the sense of a flame burns, he makes an argument - but without subjective agency, while an argument us being made I’m not sure what precisely we mean by he. Second ab…

I think you've confused the argument.

There is no denial that the subjective experience of free will is real, even to a free will denier. That is, we're not talking about qualia. See the distinction of 'hard' free will.

So in fact there was no absence of subjective agency. But I get your point. You hold the belief that free will deniers are themselves automatons. A strange but expected reversal of conclusions--understandable, as yet it's more of that reflexive defensiveness on display.

And to your second point, for your statement to follow, you'll first have to show that truth seeking has transcendent meaning or inherent value in the first place. That sounds as tough to solve as the free will debate ;).

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#215

Post by stevenhuang »

guelo wrote: post #185
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…

I think your argument against free will can be boiled down to the question of if true RNGs exist. Even leaving out quantum probability, we can easily consider systems of such high entropy that a computer the size of the universe would be unable to deterministically calculate the results.

Not true since that would then be a random will. Nothing free about that.

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#216

Post by JackFr »

stevenhuang wrote: post #214
JackFr wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose I have two points. First is that while an argument is being made, absent subjective agency on his part he is no more than a candle flame illuminating the room. The candle once lit must illuminate - it cannot do anything else. And so I grant in the sense of a flame burns, he makes an argument - but without subjective agency, while an argument us being made I’m not sure what precisely we mean by he. Second ab…

I think you've confused the argument. There is no denial that the subjective experience of free will is real, even to a free will denier. That is, we're not talking about qualia. See the distinction of 'hard' free will. So in fact there was no absence of subjective agency. But I get your point. You hold the belief that free will deniers are themselves automatons. A strange but expected reversal of conclusions--unders…

> There is no denial that the subjective experience of free will is real

I guess I am loathe to throw something so essential and universal to the human experience out the window.

I think many people get into verbal and philosophic contortions because like me they find it difficult to accept something which goes against their fundamental experience, and yet unlike me they're unable to let go of a materialist reductionist view of the universe.

> reflexive defensiveness

Reflexive - that is to say not controlled by me. ;-)

As to my second point, I cannot show that. I believe without proof that existence has meaning, justice, truth, wisdom are good and to be sought, and ignorance, slavery, cruelty are bad and to be rejected.

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#217

Post by vidarh »

awb wrote: post #173
vidarh wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wikipedia has a definition: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will > Free will is the capacity of agents to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded.

That statement at all doesn't say anything, because what does "choose unimpeded" mean?

That is at the core of this discussion, and why what then follows is a wall of text to set up compatibilism vs. incompatibilism and determinism vs indeterminism, including addressing the issue that many of the proponents of various variants would interpret "choose unimpeded" in entirely different ways.

You'll see that the page itself introduces a number of different interpretations, and you'd struggle to get most people to agree with those definitions.

E.g. many compatibilist views "work around" the determinism issue by separating our internal view of our ability to choose with the physical reality of the choices. In that case I'd agree that that kind of "soft" free will is possible, but it's also meaningless. E.g. a murderer may have exercised such "soft" free will, but that does not create any moral responsibility for their action if determinism meant they had no actual control anyway.

As such, while that kind of "free will" is reasonable to say it exists, it is not the kind of free will usually debated, because it doesn't actually address the important question of whether or not we actually have the ability to make a genuinely free choice. E.g. if we were to rewind time, could we choose differently? On the basis of what?

With the added caveat that merely another outcome in line with e.g. probabilistic effects from quantum effects are not a choice - so let's say we repeat the experiment many times: can you introduce a bias that is inconsistent with randomness; when you start diving into this you start quickly seeing that even trying to define a way of determining if something meaningfully is a "choice" gets at the core of the issue.

So let's restate it:

If we can agree that a an "unimpeded choice" is a decision that is something other than a pure deterministic or probabilistic effect caused by the preceding physical state, then how can you restate that in a way that makes its existence or nonexistence testable?

Because without that it's just woo.

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#218

Post by vidarh »

naasking wrote: post #182
vidarh wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 live…

It doesn't erase the possibility, of course. It doesn't even erase the possible moral justifications for punishment. I was very specific with my wording there for a reason: It does erase the main moral justifications used for vengeance.

With respect to using hard determinism as an excuse for vengeance, keep in mind that even a society that buys into the lack of moral justification for vengeance on a hard determinist basis will still have every reason to punish you for it purely based on the expected effect on future offending (by you or others).

This is one of the things that often cause people to react to a determinist view: They tend to think that it either makes it pointless to make choices because they have no control, or that it makes everything a free for all because you have no responsibility.

But the problem with that line of thinking is that we don't get to "step out of the illusion". We live within a world where irrespective of whether your choices are free, you do make them - choosing to do nothing (or anything) because your choices are not free is in itself a choice, and has consequences that may be good or bad for you. Making choices because you think you can use lack of free will as an excuse may or may not end well for you even if your choice to do so was not free.

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#219

Post by RHSman2 »

prmph wrote: post #57
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…

Well free does not exist only if logic is bound by what the human mind can conceive. It may be possible for something not be random, and to have no antecedent at the same time. Also, the concept of free will is bound up with the concept of consciousness. What is the entity that may or may not have free will? Until we define and understand that, free will will be an ill-defined concept not amenable to proper analysis

Amazing that all this conflab about free will and you seem to be the first to bring up consciousness. "Free Will" is a construct of consciousness don't you think?

With varying degrees of conscious capability comes increasing amounts of free will. But absolute free will? For example, I choose to end my life, because I choose too is going to be a very hard push. It is only going to happen if I really want it, and will only want it if I am in a situation that calls for such drastic action. Those situations, we can see, are generally on the peripherals (although way too common these days).

So our free will is a function of the Human Condition, which is relative to our levels of consciousness.

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#220

Post by vidarh »

kybernetikos wrote: post #159
vidarh wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I mean by setting vengeance up vs. "the bare mininal extent required to protect others". I agree that there are still people who needs to be locked up, including under possibly brutal sentencing terms. E.g. Anders Behring Breivik who carried out the 2011 terrorist attacks in Norway is up on a parole hearing today - if he gets out (it'd take a miracle) it doesn't matter if it's free will (in any sense of…

It seems that we agree that taking a game theoretic view can justify more than just 'the bare minimal extent required to protect others' as it can also include questions of setting examples and letting justice be seen to be done that can form part of the decisions of other future potential criminals, or victims who might feel like taking the law into their own hands. So, as to 'they chose this themselves', that's beg…

> This is to such an extent that I'd feel surprised to find anyone seriously try to justify it, which is why I didn't really engage with your apparent suggestion that it was an important justification.

I mean, a key example of how vengeance still plays into punishment is the level of support for capital punishment.

I'm glad we find it equally unjustified.

Also, I agree that you certainly can dismiss vengeance as a valid argument without dismissing free will, btw. - a lot of people who do believe in some variant of free will absolutely do reject vengeance. My point was more to offer up an example of something that is very hard to reconcile with rejecting free will.

Post reply on HN