If life is a game, gameplay is seriously lacking!
Regarding free will… People behave in accordance with their character, so in that sense you can say they have “free will”. The fact that " you" can’t influence the brain’s electrons is a red herring - you are the brain’s electrons!
That’s funny, since electrons can’t do anything on themselves… :):
[quote]basically an electron is moved by the forces they exert on each other
[/quote]
So much innocence is lost on JGO. :’(
Herjan, my point is that there is no self separate from the electrons and other physical bits in the brain. To say you can’t influence the electrons is not even a statement. Its like saying vampires can’t do math, well obviously, vampires don’t exist.
Pour water and oil in a glass container and leave a little room for air, then shake it up a bit. After a few moments, you witness an intricate and highly efficient process that causes the oil to end up between the air and the water - a process solely governed by the laws of physics.
Pour water and a human specimen in a glass container and leave a little room for air, then shake it up a bit. After a few moments, you witness an intricate and highly efficient process that causes the human specimen to end up between the air and the water - a process solely governed by the laws of physics.
We like to think the first experiment shows the laws of physics without attaching meaning. We however like to think the second experiment shows the struggle for survival, in which a conscious decision was made to hold ones breath, swim to the surface and breathe. What we actually see in both cases is a demonstration of emergent behavior of complex systems that boil down to particles being governed solely by the laws of physics. The human specimen from the second experiment has as much free will as the oil in the first experiment, regardless of the difference in the order of magnitude of the complexity of these systems.
I agree with that. I just don’t like the language of a disembodied “you” influencing electrons or even “sitting back and enjoying the ride”. These are simply non-statements.
Regarding the first statement: the ‘you’ refers to ‘your consciousness’, which is indeed a non-statement, because there is no such thing as consciousness, but people were unwilling to let that concept go, hence refering to it as something that actually exists.
Regarding the second statement: that was a joke, as you are not able to ‘decide’ whether to take the advice to sit back and relax.
This is what atoms do when bouncing around for a few hundred million years…
[tr]
[td]
[/td]
[td]
[/td]
[td]
[/td]
[td]
[/td]
[/tr]
And vampires do exist.
The brain is the only device that yields true intelligence.
It is more than the sum of its parts.
Free Choice does exist, however that does not mean that it isn’t deterministic. It’s just that there are way too many factors, so much so that I myself can change my mind many times in a short time frame.
And we cant even predict the weather yet :<
But yes eventually we are just biological machines so everything is deterministic.
Although… neurology is on some level quantum physics and deals with inherent randomness, probably making it not completely deterministic afterall…
@electron argument :
I don’t have to directly influence an electron to make a choice. Making a choice is a very high level cognitive function and electrons are super low level
It’s possibly too lazy to say just that, but it’s true: truth depends on your definitions. Even on your definition of truth.
I could write up a big philosophical rant looking at both sides of the argument of “free will”, but I doubt it would convince anyone who already has their mind set, and it would be meaningless anyway. Some questions do not need to be answered in order to live a satisfying life.
Most of the opinions here are heavily influenced by other aspects of the writer’s life. (Most likely, religion, or the lack thereof.)
My viewpoint is both that we have free will, and that everything that happens is pre-determined. The two are not mutually exclusive. If viewed from ‘outside of time’, if you can imagine that, they are both the same thing. What you did was always going to happen, because you did it. If you try to “change your fate” (if you believe in that), you’re not changing anything because you didn’t choose the other option in the first place. And at the same time, you are exercising free will by choosing the option which you did.
It doesn’t matter if your “free will” is predetermined or not. The fact is that your decisions are your decisions. And your decisions come from who you are. For your decisions to be different would require you to change yourself into a different person, which can’t be done. How the universe came to the point of you making your decisions does not change you or your decisions.
We are what we make ourselves to be, and what we make ourselves to be is what we are.
(Hmm… Maybe it did turn into a philosophical rant)
Society will never (in the near future at least) accept the model that everything is predetermined in the universe, because Joe didn’t choose to kill his girlfriend, and John didn’t choose to rob a bank.
Forget that…it’s just too depressing to think about. I know I don’t. (I was forced to type that…sigh)
According to modern theoretical physics there are more than four dimensions. (3D + time + theoretical mess)
Therefore there are other timelines all happening at once.
Now here is the brain****. Stop thinking of time as this linear momentum that keeps moving forward, and rather think of it like a real dimension. Try to imagine moving down a 1D line. You are currently at one point, and you feel like your moving down point by point. Does that mean all the previous points do not exist anymore? And do the future ones already exists? Following the assumption that they do exist. Then the whole timeline already all exists. So you right before you read this still exists frozen somewhere in 4D space.
Now imagine a 5th dimension where multiple 4D spaces exist. Therefore every possible timeline exists at once. So be happy, somewhere in 5D space this convo was never posted onto JGO.
Also I don’t claim to even somewhat understand what the hell I just said. Just another perspective on determinism. but here :
These arguments about “free will” trivialize consciousness, which is genuinely complex and problematic. Our actions are the result of many forces, most of them embedded in the environment and in over-learned, habitual behaviour, with only a tiny portion of consciousness able to review and try to change course. That ability is limited, and that ability is the most interesting aspect of “free will” to me.
If you want to consider something really interesting, check out the following article.
Experiment 1:
Subjects are given two paragraphs to read about a growing crime problem in a city called Addison. After they read the article, they are asked to make suggestions as to what might be done to address this problem. The answers differed measurably, affected by an embedded metaphor in the two paragraphs. Only a tiny fraction of the people taking this experiment listed this metaphor as having contributed to their reasoning process.
The paragraph was as follows:
Folks that read the “wild beast preying on” version tended to come up with “capture/enforce/punish” suggestions (e.g., hire more police, build more prisons, lengthen jail terms). Folks that read the “virus infecting” version where more likely to have “diagnose/treat/inoculate” suggestions (e.g., look for root cause, try to fix economy, improve education) than the first population.
That’s two measurably different responses on the conservative/liberal spectrum. Results were independent of politics, age or gender. In other words, self-identified liberals tended to suggest more of the punitive suggestions if they read the “wild beast” paragraph, and vice versa.
It is kind of astonishing to me how much the metaphor, a silly figure of speech, can have such a profound effect on the responses of people without them being aware of the manipulation.
You want to talk about “free will” and whether a brain can affect the position of atoms? I think it would be more pertinent to talk about our susceptibilities to such manipulations, to the strengths and weaknesses of conscious awareness. If you don’t think this is much of an issue, I would point out that there are major think tanks devoted to crafting metaphors to use to frame discussions and thus influence political outcomes. We are subjected to this stuff all the time. We have it in out power to become more aware and less susceptible. That to me is a more important aspect of “free will.” I really don’t like the idea of being herded about this way or that without even aware of it.
Physics “models”. Don’t confuse models with reality. There are well established basic bits and pieces which are excessively likely to be correct…everything else are requirements for the model. Reality is probably deterministic simply because it seems to be the most simple. Also, as I’ve said now a number of times, talking about dimensions is a tricky thing. The standard model of Euclidean 3D space is a 8 dimensional vector space. Add a couple of rules and number of dimensions in the vector space explodes…but we’re still talking about 3 spatial dimensions. I know of no compelling argument to suppose that time is actually a spatial dimension. It seems rather unlikely. Just because some models require that notion doesn’t make it so.
Insanely unlike in reality. That requires infinite information.
Any system composed of other systems is bound by the characteristics of these subsystems. Anything more complex is emergent behavior.
The only way free will can exist is when our understanding of physics is fundamentally flawed. People look for unknowns in science to leave room for free will, yet those who look at quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle, fail to realize that if that is responsible for free will, it means any particle in the universe would have this property. Not a single observation has been made that suggests this is the case, yet it cannot be falsified.
Regarding multiple dimensions and models in general: just like Roquen said: just because the math adds up, doesn’t mean we should assume it exists.
Three scientists enter an empty lab.
Five scientists leave the lab.
How many scientists have to join the remaining scientists in the lab for it to be empty again?
Not if you consider to be some sort of Planck length in time-space as well.
misunderstood what you meant. If you take an initial universe and run it in a simulator (oh maybe i shouldn’t have said that). No matter what choice everything makes, there is actually a finite amount of possible configurations the universe could have. There is the beginning, the end, and every possible way to get from one to the other with our initial conditions. If you consider the universe to run on a fixed timestep then there is a finite amount of choices possible to be made.
Does gravity not count as a compelling argument. Einstein often refers to the 4th dimension as a spacial dimension.
Think of 3D space as a perfectly stretched and flat 2D blanket. Now put a heavy ball on this blanket. Well the force from the weight of the ball is orthogonal to the blanket so, according to gravity and tension. The blanket would bend just a bit in 3D space. If you were a 2D object on the blanket you would feel like the closer you got to this ball the more things around you would seem to warp. Take off the ball and draw a straight line. Put the ball back on near the straight line. The straight line bends inwards towards the ball.
I don’t have time to get too indepth on the analogy. But if you imagine Gravity as a 4th dimensional bend in a 3D world, rather than a 3D bend in a 2D world as in the example. It seems to make a lot of sense that gravity is a 4th dimensional warp in space.
Electron double slit experiment. Delayed choice made by electrons and even larger structures. This could almost be seen as free will and opens up another idea that has to do with 5th dimensional space, which has to do with all other possibility disappearing once one decision has been made.
Whether these models are “real” or not are obviously up to speculation, but if you can’t prove it right or wrong have an open mind to it. These models have been around for almost 100 years now.
I don’t understand any of your responses. It sounds like you’re now agreeing that “all possibilities exist at once” is not possible. On time being a real spatial dimension you talk about the time-space model but for time to be a real spatial dimension means that at the lowest level things must be able to move in both directions across all of that space. There’s no reason to suppose that is so. You give an example of probabilistic behavior…you can find many of these, but they don’t mean anything. probabilistic behavior is easy to explain…we don’t have all the state information and the observed thing is made up of many smaller things. Even if we came up with an approaching ideal model and that model contained probabilistic behavior…it still would mean much much. We’d have a accurate predictive model based on what’s observable.
Who freakin’ cares about free will! I think you guys may be looking at the wrong big picture here! Life (scientifically) is the result of a bunch of a bunch of atoms randomly being placed together after a massive explosion. That alone should be enough. There is no reason to debate over free will when we will never have the answer to it so just kick back and be bewildered by the fact that you are alive. ;D