13 ms·

> Where free will enters the picture is that not everybody that was lucky at some point in their life ends up making it: you can easily annihilate your luck by

> Where free will enters the picture is that not everybody that was lucky at some point in their life ends up making it: you can easily annihilate your luck by working against yourself. What do you think determines this? At what point can you say this magical thing called free will pops into existence? I don't understand how the laws of physics determine how the universe behaves but then those laws decide to step aside while someone is making decisions about their life.

ams6110 8y ago
They aren't laws. Free will, persistence, a determination to make one's life better, are things some people have more of than others, and things that one's parents might have encouraged more than others. Why? Who knows? Why are some people taller than others, or more athletic, etc. People are not all the same.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  > Why are some people taller than others, or more athletic, etc. People are not all the same. Genetics and environment.
  - AstralStorm 8y ago
    Too glib and trite. These things can change, and are affected by us. Three key here is that collectively we have the power to fix things yet we do not collectively exercise it enough and build systems that make it harder.
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      You don't change your genetics in any meaningful way during your life no matter how much you want to influence them. If you're born with Down syndrome that's that. A predisposition for getting certain kinds of cancer tend to be born out by statistics. Having a body that works well for athletics is mostly a function of genetics and training. No amount of collective work is going to make everybody athletes, the whole definition of an athlete is 'outlier'. What we can change collectively is education and diet.
      - AstralStorm 8y ago
        I meant as a society. We have the power to fix many of these things but we choose not to exercise it for allegedly ethical reasons and the economics. Genetics are not a life sentence either except in the most complex cases - genes are activated and regulated by the environment. Sometimes even environment in the womb. Not just diet. Exposure to chemicals and mother's illnesses too. Or main limitations here are ethics and lack of knowledge, both self imposed.
TheCoreh 8y ago
These are two separate discussions, really: - Is the universe fully deterministic? We don't know the answer to that, and it's possible we might never know - Are the life decisions that I make correlated with my success? That one is easier to work out: Even if the "decisions" turn out to be "pseudo-random" due to the properties of the underlying universe, they could still be correlated with success, therefore it's useful to devote resources into deliberately moving closer to that "success" (even if there are external/random factors) at play
- kazinator 8y ago
  I'd feel satisfied if it turned out that I'm a deterministic machine planted in a nondeterministic universe.
  - Diederich 8y ago
    Why? What's the difference?
- harshreality 8y ago
  > - Are the life decisions that I make correlated with my success? That one is easier to work out: Even if the "decisions" turn out to be "pseudo-random" due to the properties of the underlying universe, they could still be correlated with success, therefore it's useful to devote resources into deliberately moving closer to that "success" (even if there are external/random factors) at play But "devoting resources to deliberately moving closer to that 'success'" is just as much not-determined-by-you as everything else, whether it's fully deterministic in a classical physics sense, or partly deterministic, and part randomly quantum-influenced. The notion that you can influence yourself is true... your thoughts a second ago influence your thoughts now. So, through introspection, you can see that you're influencing yourself. But it's a mirage, because you're not at the root of the chain of causation going back to the first thought you had, so you don't control the thought you had a second ago, and you don't control any external factors (senses) that influenced you between your last thought and your current thought, so you don't control your thought now. The reason you devote resources to moving closer to success isn't that you're "deciding" (from no prior state) to do that. Rather, your psychology is already such that you want to actively improve yourself, you don't have other psychological issues that would sabotage that desire, and you see a path to improve yourself. What better to do, then, than to move yourself along that path toward future success?
jacquesm 8y ago
There's a school of thought that states that the brain operates at a quantum level, and there is a more classical view that it's all 'billiard balls', and some people are in between there somewhere and see the billiard balls setup as so complex that the knowledge about any initial configuration must always be incomplete. Only in the classical 'billiard balls' universe would there not be free will, in every other situation there has to be some element that allows us to make choices for good or bad. Interesting aside: if an omnipotent being would exist and we'd live in a classical billiard balls universe that being would be able to predict the outcome of its own creation which would obviate the need for creating stuff in the first place. So 'free will' is a central tenet of almost every religion, and according to that we are given choices and how we make those choices determines whether we are 'worthy' or not. Obviously it doesn't require religion to have free will but I find it interesting that religions have caught on to this so universally. Good, if somewhat large book that touches on this subject: The emperors new mind, by Roger Penrose.
- Diederich 8y ago
  > Only in the classical 'billiard balls' universe would there not be free will, in every other situation there has to be some element that allows us to make choices for good or bad. I think you're saying that a 'billiard balls' universe is deterministic, even if it's far beyond our ability to either detect a given state or predict outcomes, and that otherwise in the 'quantum' view, there is true chance, or randomness, involved. I'm assuming that's what you're going from. Given that, why do you believe that free will must come from a universe that has real chance in it? (If that's an accurate statement of your belief.) How does free will necessarily flow from fundamental randomness?
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    Because that element of randomness introduces the room that allows decisions to go one way or the other not dependent on the initial conditions. The question then shifts to 'is the state of the universe at any point in time knowable', and if it isn't then you probably will have vector through which thinking creatures could have free will. And even if the whole string of chance encounters up to there did not exhibit free will the ability to choose an outcome would quickly become a selection criterion in any genetic mix that ends up laying out a nervous system. After all, the ability to react intelligently to an environment is a huge benefit. In a 'billiard balls' (as you correctly infer, deterministic) universe it doesn't matter whether minds exist or not, the outcome will be identical. Having reasoning ability in a universe like that would be akin to a cruel version of being along for the ride without any ability to influence your environment. And I don't think we need to look very far to determine that our minds have very successfully influenced our environment so there is some evidence that it makes a difference. Ah! says the proponent of the deterministic universe: but if it were deterministic it would be just the same! Which to me is just as much a cop-out as saying 'God did it'. Randomness is a thing, entropy is a thing and quantum mechanics operates at a level that our brains are ill equipped to deal with. It appears to me that free will is real, and our whole society is built on that premise.
collyw 8y ago
The laws of physics haven't explained consciousness or free will, so looking at physics for the answer doesn't seem to be the right way to be going about it.
- lostmsu 8y ago
  What do you mean by "not explained"? We sort of know how they work. The only arguments against that are mostly philosophical.
  - collyw 8y ago
    No we don't. Not even close.
    - lostmsu 8y ago
      You can tell it to AlphaGo, char-rnn and other similar recent stuff. They lack self-awareness, but that is mostly due to lack of reflections in their respective environments.

ams6110 8y ago

They aren't laws. Free will, persistence, a determination to make one's life better, are things some people have more of than others, and things that one's parents might have encouraged more than others. Why? Who knows? Why are some people taller than others, or more athletic, etc. People are not all the same.

jacquesm 8y ago
> Why are some people taller than others, or more athletic, etc. People are not all the same. Genetics and environment.
- AstralStorm 8y ago
  Too glib and trite. These things can change, and are affected by us. Three key here is that collectively we have the power to fix things yet we do not collectively exercise it enough and build systems that make it harder.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    You don't change your genetics in any meaningful way during your life no matter how much you want to influence them. If you're born with Down syndrome that's that. A predisposition for getting certain kinds of cancer tend to be born out by statistics. Having a body that works well for athletics is mostly a function of genetics and training. No amount of collective work is going to make everybody athletes, the whole definition of an athlete is 'outlier'. What we can change collectively is education and diet.
    - AstralStorm 8y ago
      I meant as a society. We have the power to fix many of these things but we choose not to exercise it for allegedly ethical reasons and the economics. Genetics are not a life sentence either except in the most complex cases - genes are activated and regulated by the environment. Sometimes even environment in the womb. Not just diet. Exposure to chemicals and mother's illnesses too. Or main limitations here are ethics and lack of knowledge, both self imposed.

TheCoreh 8y ago

These are two separate discussions, really: - Is the universe fully deterministic? We don't know the answer to that, and it's possible we might never know - Are the life decisions that I make correlated with my success? That one is easier to work out: Even if the "decisions" turn out to be "pseudo-random" due to the properties of the underlying universe, they could still be correlated with success, therefore it's useful to devote resources into deliberately moving closer to that "success" (even if there are external/random factors) at play

kazinator 8y ago
I'd feel satisfied if it turned out that I'm a deterministic machine planted in a nondeterministic universe.
- Diederich 8y ago
  Why? What's the difference?
harshreality 8y ago
> - Are the life decisions that I make correlated with my success? That one is easier to work out: Even if the "decisions" turn out to be "pseudo-random" due to the properties of the underlying universe, they could still be correlated with success, therefore it's useful to devote resources into deliberately moving closer to that "success" (even if there are external/random factors) at play But "devoting resources to deliberately moving closer to that 'success'" is just as much not-determined-by-you as everything else, whether it's fully deterministic in a classical physics sense, or partly deterministic, and part randomly quantum-influenced. The notion that you can influence yourself is true... your thoughts a second ago influence your thoughts now. So, through introspection, you can see that you're influencing yourself. But it's a mirage, because you're not at the root of the chain of causation going back to the first thought you had, so you don't control the thought you had a second ago, and you don't control any external factors (senses) that influenced you between your last thought and your current thought, so you don't control your thought now. The reason you devote resources to moving closer to success isn't that you're "deciding" (from no prior state) to do that. Rather, your psychology is already such that you want to actively improve yourself, you don't have other psychological issues that would sabotage that desire, and you see a path to improve yourself. What better to do, then, than to move yourself along that path toward future success?

jacquesm 8y ago

There's a school of thought that states that the brain operates at a quantum level, and there is a more classical view that it's all 'billiard balls', and some people are in between there somewhere and see the billiard balls setup as so complex that the knowledge about any initial configuration must always be incomplete. Only in the classical 'billiard balls' universe would there not be free will, in every other situation there has to be some element that allows us to make choices for good or bad. Interesting aside: if an omnipotent being would exist and we'd live in a classical billiard balls universe that being would be able to predict the outcome of its own creation which would obviate the need for creating stuff in the first place. So 'free will' is a central tenet of almost every religion, and according to that we are given choices and how we make those choices determines whether we are 'worthy' or not. Obviously it doesn't require religion to have free will but I find it interesting that religions have caught on to this so universally. Good, if somewhat large book that touches on this subject: The emperors new mind, by Roger Penrose.

Diederich 8y ago
> Only in the classical 'billiard balls' universe would there not be free will, in every other situation there has to be some element that allows us to make choices for good or bad. I think you're saying that a 'billiard balls' universe is deterministic, even if it's far beyond our ability to either detect a given state or predict outcomes, and that otherwise in the 'quantum' view, there is true chance, or randomness, involved. I'm assuming that's what you're going from. Given that, why do you believe that free will must come from a universe that has real chance in it? (If that's an accurate statement of your belief.) How does free will necessarily flow from fundamental randomness?
- jacquesm 8y ago
  Because that element of randomness introduces the room that allows decisions to go one way or the other not dependent on the initial conditions. The question then shifts to 'is the state of the universe at any point in time knowable', and if it isn't then you probably will have vector through which thinking creatures could have free will. And even if the whole string of chance encounters up to there did not exhibit free will the ability to choose an outcome would quickly become a selection criterion in any genetic mix that ends up laying out a nervous system. After all, the ability to react intelligently to an environment is a huge benefit. In a 'billiard balls' (as you correctly infer, deterministic) universe it doesn't matter whether minds exist or not, the outcome will be identical. Having reasoning ability in a universe like that would be akin to a cruel version of being along for the ride without any ability to influence your environment. And I don't think we need to look very far to determine that our minds have very successfully influenced our environment so there is some evidence that it makes a difference. Ah! says the proponent of the deterministic universe: but if it were deterministic it would be just the same! Which to me is just as much a cop-out as saying 'God did it'. Randomness is a thing, entropy is a thing and quantum mechanics operates at a level that our brains are ill equipped to deal with. It appears to me that free will is real, and our whole society is built on that premise.

collyw 8y ago

The laws of physics haven't explained consciousness or free will, so looking at physics for the answer doesn't seem to be the right way to be going about it.

lostmsu 8y ago
What do you mean by "not explained"? We sort of know how they work. The only arguments against that are mostly philosophical.
- collyw 8y ago
  No we don't. Not even close.
  - lostmsu 8y ago
    You can tell it to AlphaGo, char-rnn and other similar recent stuff. They lack self-awareness, but that is mostly due to lack of reflections in their respective environments.