🧵 Untitled Thread
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 01:35:24 UTC No. 16062149
Randomness in quantum mechanics is not the same as free will, is it?
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 01:54:18 UTC No. 16062160
>>16062149
free will is a sensation, if you think it's the sensation of some specific aspect of reality you need to be clear about what that aspect is before you start making comparisons to it
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 02:23:23 UTC No. 16062177
>omg, my brain, it feels so big!!!
>its full of so much schizo kike jargon and fancy soience polysyllables
>oh no
>i can't hold it in any longer
>i'm…
>i'm gonna…
>i'm gonna QUANTUUUUUUUUMMMMMM!!!!!!
bodhi at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 03:24:20 UTC No. 16062221
>>16062149
there is no randomness in quantum mechanics, it is an illusion
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 03:25:32 UTC No. 16062224
>>16062149
No, but it's okay, because determinism is a delusional framework anyways. Causal determinism in basics physics models is unverifiable nonsense, why would we assume that consciousness follows these same unverifiable models?
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 03:33:13 UTC No. 16062236
>>16062224
Name one observed macro scale phenomenon that isn't causal.
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 03:34:24 UTC No. 16062239
>>16062149
>Science Jew says you're a meat robot
Cringe
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 04:35:17 UTC No. 16062303
>>16062236
Literally every kinematic interaction that involves any amount of friction/conversion of kinetic energy to thermal energy. They are all fundamentally stochastic.
The contributions of the stochastic components may be negligible, but they are stochastic.
Similarly, any basic kinematic equation that involves an object moving through a medium that isn't free space. The state of the medium will be both stochastic in the sense of it is unobservable (and often uncomputable) and that the interactions will involve energy transitions which only can be causal in an "average" sense.
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 04:37:36 UTC No. 16062309
>>16062149
Randomness and Free Will are incongruent. Free Will is control. Randomness is non-control. Control comes only in causal connections tied to action and result with the self system.
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 04:41:38 UTC No. 16062311
>>16062149
Your brain depending on random quantum mechanics doesn't imply you control those events. Why would it? It means there is a random element to your brain. What difference does it make for you if a number is truly random and predetermined in a unknown way? None at all.
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 04:44:22 UTC No. 16062315
>>16062311
>truly random and predetermined in a unknown way?
or predetermined in a unknown way*
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 05:44:49 UTC No. 16062379
>>16062303
>it is unobservable
Just because something is unobserved or unobservable, doesn't mean it's acausal. Please explain how things happen without prior causes.
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 05:49:39 UTC No. 16062388
>>16062379
> Please explain how things happen without prior causes.
You are confusing "causal" with "deterministic."
Causal state evolution can be either deterministic or stochastic. A system being causal just means that the previous states up to including the current one are sufficient for the system to produce the "next state." This doesn't tell you anything at all about whether or not the state transition process is deterministic or has stochastic process contributions.
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 05:54:06 UTC No. 16062390
>>16062388
Why do things get increasingly deterministic as they get bigger?
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 05:55:15 UTC No. 16062391
>>16062379
>>16062388
I realized maybe I wasn't being clear here.
The problem with "causal determinism" isn't the "causal" part. The "causal" part of that concept just means that "the present doesn't depend on the future." This is true for physically realized systems regardless of whether they are deterministic.
The problem is the "determinism." All of the current evidence seems to suggest that even at macro scales there are intractable process noise contributions to just about every realized physical process. You can't do simple college level kinematics without having some non-zero stochastic problems introduced by friction. You can't do simple college level circuits without having stochastic problems with resistance and heat transitions. It appears like stochastic processes are there all the way down.
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 06:00:08 UTC No. 16062393
>>16062390
If I had to guess it has to do with what people in Statistical analysis call "signal to noise ratio."
These intractable random processes appear to mostly deal with energy exchanges and the conversion of matter to energy. When you have a very heavy object with a lot of mass, these random fluctuations from friction as it moves through the air will be a loss less meaningful than if the object is small. Basically the "ratio" of the "power" of the deterministic part appears much larger than the "power" of the stochastic part.
In general, most things we call deterministic are really just us observing some average tendency (which may or may not be deterministic for individual contributing factors to the average), and big objects tend to be more smoothed and average relative to the total amount of variation they could have for that same amount of material.
However, this is my guess. I could be wrong.
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 07:04:00 UTC No. 16062439
>>16062388
So what's the opposite of causal evolution? Also, are Markov chains deterministic or stochastic seeing how ubiquitous they are in engineering and science, I tend to think both are used. In modelling, the equations assume determinism then pertub it using white noise and try to see whether stability is recovered. So in his sense, purely stochastic and deterministic processes don't exist independently in nature.
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 07:06:45 UTC No. 16062449
>>16062177
lol
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 07:10:58 UTC No. 16062453
>>16062439
> What's the opposite of a non-causal evolution?
The most clear mathematical example (unless you want to get into time reversal or something speculative like that) are one-to-many mappings. These don't happen in physical state evolution, but are ubiquitous in statistical modeling when you are trying to determine which of many potential causal factors actually occurred.
> Are Markov chains deterministic or stochastic.
Markov chains are by definition stochastic. In many engineering applications your Markov chain will be basically a determinstic ordinary differential equation with some additive stochastic process disturbance/error. The Markov chain/process is stochastic because of the stochastic errors even though there is an underlying deterministic structure in there as well that could be strictly deterministic on the average.
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 07:20:01 UTC No. 16062464
>>16062453
The opposite of a causal evolution* oops. A lack of sleep is causally related to me being more retarded than usual.
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 07:47:14 UTC No. 16062496
>>16062453
One to many mapping? Like a likelihood function that maps data to the most likely distributions?
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 07:56:29 UTC No. 16062506
>>16062496
Not exactly, though probabilistic functions could be thought of sort of like this. A probabilistic function is a function that maps a single input to a set of possible outputs with a probability measure associated with each. However, each realization will only be one of these from the set. It will be a sample, and as a result is still causal.
The one-to-many problem is when you have a single input which maps to a set of outputs in superposition. A likelihood function could be thought of like this if it's a likelihood function for a hypothesis test. Your likelihood function will map this one observation to multiple different distributions according to each hypothesis/class and these exist in superposition until a decision function "collapses" the test by selecting one and closing the "one-to-many" via a "many-to-one."
The classic example of this people go to in physics is "quantum superposition" in which a particle after a particular observation is then supposed to be in a superposition of many possible states until the observation "collapses" said superposition. I'm not a QM researcher and really only know the basics from my undergrad, but systems that are not causal are ones like this.
There is a "one-to-many" process which maps a single input to a set of outputs that exist in superposition until a decision function "collapses" this superposition into the causal evaluation that occurs in physical reality. This decision function could be an abstract one like a statistical decision rule, or it could be a physical one like the "observation process" in QM, or it could be some other kind of decision function that's beyond what I or others even can currently conceptualize.
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 13:04:56 UTC No. 16062711
>>16062506
So isn't this decision that collapses the observation sort of deterministic?
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 13:47:00 UTC No. 16062750
>>16062711
How do you figure? In statistics your decision rules generally are (e.g., your test statistic crosses some threshold) but not necessarily. You could have a decision rule that flips a coin to determine whether the current sample set is enough (as an example).
The decision that collapses the set function could really be anything.
In terms of the physical observation part of things for QM/stochastic systems, I don't think we know yet whether the relationship between superposition and observation has some underlying deterministic structure. It would very much change the way our interpretations of QM work if that turned out to be true.
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 13:56:13 UTC No. 16062760
>>16062750
In the sense that there are always a certain number of observations with certain quality that are observed.
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 14:03:21 UTC No. 16062770
>>16062760
1) Why are there always a certain number of observations? What do you mean by quality of the observations/observers?
2) Let's assume that this is true. Let's say there's a fixed number of observations for a realization and the observations are always of a fixed quality. How does this tell you that in general the process of the observation selecting from the set of superimposed states is a deterministic process? What if the observation process is flipping a let of coins corresponding to the cardinality of the superimposed set and picking which state corresponds to it (in an abstract sense)? Why does the number of observations being fixed necessarily tell you that they are deterministic? They could be, but they could also be and we have no clue how to tell the difference.
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 14:16:59 UTC No. 16062778
>>16062149
total lack of control =/= free will
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 16:20:37 UTC No. 16062975
>>16062770
>Why does the number of observations being fixed necessarily tell you that they are deterministic?
Because it follows from implicit assumptions you have made about what to expect. You don't expect an infinite number of observations. You could argue that the experiment is well behaved because you have designed it as so, but isn't observation without planning or design the same and yet the feedback we get from this is more or less consistent with what we expect? Basically what I am saying is that our minds work in such a way as to always expect determinism, that's why induction is a thing.
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 16:38:19 UTC No. 16063008
>>16062975
It is interesting that you use the word "expect," because I suspect that this is where a lot of the miscommunication happens.
Expectation (both in a probabilistic sense, and in a psychological sense) is a process of averaging. It is very possible that a system which is stochastic (meaning any particular realization is neither consistently predictable or consistently replicable) can have an average that is deterministic. In fact, that's how stationary probability distributions function.
If your claim is that we expect consistency, and thus our brain operates in this way which is deterministic in some average sense, you may very well be right. The problem is that the average doesn't give you any insight into individual realizations beyond where you "expect" them to be.
If anything, you might say this is the story of physics. We produce models which are deterministic on the average, which have irreconcilable randomness for any individual trial or observation. Physicists then argue that because the averages are in some sense reliably deterministic that the individual state evolution for the realizations which go into the average must also be. I do not see any reason to believe that this is the case.
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 16:58:48 UTC No. 16063051
randomness and chaos constructs the illusion of free will. by giving you choices. simple as.
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 16:59:47 UTC No. 16063056
>>16063008
>The problem is that the average doesn't give you any insight into individual realizations beyond where you "expect" them to be.
The problem is that you expect it to be any different. Our brains are not made to handle what you would call true randomness. Let's assume that all there is is this true randomness then how can there be any consistency in how the world works despite our observations? Maybe it's a scale issue. From smallest to largest, Randomness, Determinism and finally Silence where nothing significant happens.
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 17:03:09 UTC No. 16063068
>>16062177
KEK
>>16062149
Sorry but even quantum quantum quantum won't save childish notions of free will https://arxiv.org/pdf/2010.01324.pd
Anyway its funny that few seem to realize that a non-compatibilist version of free requires the violation of several laws of physics they most certainly hold to be true
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 17:05:01 UTC No. 16063073
>>16063056
why do you suppose randomness means your decisions are random? that's not how randomness works in the brain. randomness gives you options. your "free will" algorithm is something specialized on picking something from many, depending on your goals and other factors at that particular decisional moment.
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 17:06:36 UTC No. 16063079
>>16062778
It do tho. All your thoughts and actions are spoken for before anyone asked (You).
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 17:24:32 UTC No. 16063122
>>16063073
It's not really about decisions so much as it is about making sense of the world. If randomness existed in that scale we wouldn't even be able to use language to make sense of anything.
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 17:30:07 UTC No. 16063137
>>16063073
> Why do you suppose that randomness means your decisions are random.
I don't suppose that. I suppose that randomness existing means that it is possible that they could be random. The burden of proof is then on the people who believe that decisions have no randomness to support their beliefs. Sapolsky, as I understand him, essentially argues that because there is no macrophysical randomness that there cannot be randomness in the process of perception and decision.
The problem with his argument is that there actually is macrophysical randomness. This macrophysical randomness appears intractable for individual interactions and only goes away when you average. If you suppose that all decisions are themselves inherently an averaging process then it is possible that these decisions could be non-random, but even then these averages could have random elements. The conditional expectation is itself a random variable if the underlying data itself is random.
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 17:32:14 UTC No. 16063144
>>16062149
Randomness in quantum mechanics is just statistical approximation of a deterministic-but-highly-nonlinear system.
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 17:35:38 UTC No. 16063149
>>16063122
> If randomness existed in that scale we wouldn't even be able to use language to make sense of the world.
This is just fundamentally not true. Language does not need to be something that refers to entirely fixed objects in order for semantic meaning to be imparted. In fact, we can be certain that this isn't the case because language itself refers to objects which have changing meaning over time and differing interpretation person to person.
In some sense we are all uncertain that the sun will not explode tomorrow. And yet, life still goes on because we expect it not to. This isn't because we have no uncertainty, it's because our uncertainty is marginal enough that it doesn't factor into most people's thoughts.
You know this must be the case because there are parts of your life and your view of the world that you must be uncertain about. There are memories that you are uncertain if you are recalling all of the details exactly correctly. There are subjects in which you are uncertain whether you understand them. Yet this doesn't prevent you from acting and making decisions.
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 17:38:22 UTC No. 16063152
>>16063144
Do you actually have any reason to believe this is true beyond wanting it to be out of mathematical/philosophical convenience?
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 17:38:48 UTC No. 16063153
>>16063137
pretty sure we already know human brain needs chaos, and entropy is artificially injected into AI/AGI efforts, at least that's what I remembered reading. I've even seen some papers where high entropy in certain areas means higher intelligence or it was somehow linked to intelligence. can't remember well but entropy is crucial to our experience.
my argument is simple, the illusion of free will is heavily supported by chaos and even pure randomness. but it is an illusion.
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 17:47:14 UTC No. 16063166
>>16063153
When you use the word "entropy" what specific notion of entropy are you referring to?
When you are talking about ML decision systems, this entropy is Shannon entropy and isn't "injected," it's fundamentally a part of the process of making decisions based on observations with stochastic uncertainty.
If you are specifically talking about decision systems/classification there is a notion of "artificial noise" by adding some probability of randomly choosing a class regardless of what the decision statistic tells you. This sort of thing is used all the time in Markov decision processes to avoid over fitting (meaning, trusting your training too much relative to trusting your recent observations). This is "added entropy" but it isn't some illusory thing, it is to solve the specific problem of a decision systems becoming too confident in what it has previously learned.
It wouldn't surprise me if this exact sort of thing is implemented biologically somewhere. Otherwise, organisms would be far too inflexible and unable to adapt to changing environments or learn new information.
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 17:51:50 UTC No. 16063173
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNz
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 18:10:28 UTC No. 16063198
>>16063152
Work in statistical mechanics long enough and you quickly realize that everything we attribute to "randomness" is just a placeholder for systems we can't solve analytically due to a lack of information about the underlying dynamics, too many interactions to solve for, or (more often) both.
We don't have the ability to know the instantaneous dynamics of a trillion trillion atoms or the ability to model their individual scatterings off each other and off of a mote of dust, but we know we can approximate the dynamics of the system as a statistical random walk. But if we *did* have the ability to do those things, we *could* treat the system deterministically.
We don't have the ability to model a bound electron interacting with a trillion trillion trillion photons every second, all with different momenta and energy, but we recognize that the end result of all that interaction is that the bound electron exhibits momentum and energy that can be statistically approximated as wave-like.
The only difference between these two systems is the scale: As you go to lower and lower energies and momenta it becomes exponentially more difficult for their to be a scenario (even hypothetically) where you *could* (even hypothetically) know those deterministic quantities without altering the system.
The answers to quantum mysteries aren't going to be found in metaphysical philosophizing about the "random" nature of reality - they're going to be found in understanding the emergent statistical trends that come out of different chaotic systems: What underlying deterministic interactions can lead to the statistical behaviors we observe.
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 18:20:28 UTC No. 16063217
>>16063198
>We don't have the ability to know the
even if you did you couldn't predict a random radioactive decay, which changes everything. including DNA.
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 18:24:12 UTC No. 16063225
>>16063198
> But if we *did* have the ability to do those things, we *could* treat the system deterministically.
The funny part is that you've both hidden the ball and given the game away with this statement. It is fundamentally a metaphysical claim you are making and you don't even realize it.
When you model the evolution of a deterministic system there are always two types of uncertainties one needs to consider.
The first are measurement uncertainties. These are relating to not knowing what errors are introduced in the process of getting the measurements. They could be in the form of tractable uncertainties (e.g., your model for relating the measurements to the state has errors in the parameters which could be improved) or intractable uncertainties (e.g., your measurement process actively interacts with the object being measured in a way which interferes with its state).
The second kind of uncertainty is a process uncertainty. This too also has tractable and intractable components. You could (for example) refine your kinematic model so that your parameters and motion model becomes more and more reflective of the underlying deterministic structure. However, there are also potentially intractable process uncertainties. You don't know for certain that all elements of the state transition process are deterministic.
What you are doing is making the *metaphysical* claim that all process uncertainties are modeling uncertainties. That with more and more refinement it is possible (even if just in an abstract sense) to fully capture the state of the system.
My claim is that you don't actually know this, and are confusing your modeling assumption for the evolution of the state you are trying to model.
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 18:29:16 UTC No. 16063237
>>16063225
>>16063198
Model the evolution of a deterministic system in the presence of uncertainty* sorry. Not enough coffee and too smooth of a brain.
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 19:18:44 UTC No. 16063322
>>16063225
>>16063237
My argument isn't that quantum uncertainty doesn't exist, but that it results from underlying deterministic processes which we lack the ability to directly measure and overcome. Even from an abstract perspective these uncertainties are intractable, but only because any interaction at that scale becomes non-perturbatory. I don't believe that quantum uncertainty can be overcome by refinement of technique or modelling, but I do believe that by expanding our understanding of nonlinear dynamics, we could one day glean some insight into the underlying deterministic interactions driving that uncertainty. The difference between a random system and a chaotic system may seem like semantics, but it's an important distinction.
Seeing how the field has developed over the last twenty years, I believe that the maturation of NLD will be the driver of theoretical physics in the mid-21st century.
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 19:30:42 UTC No. 16063346
>>16063322
>My argument isn't that quantum uncertainty doesn't exist
so you'd be able to predict which atom will decay next? tunneling event?
seems to me like you're forcing one of those "reasonable assumptions" type deal trying to squeeze one in without FUCKING PROOF
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 19:57:52 UTC No. 16063385
>>16063149
I said randomness exists in scale. True randomness is just not there. It's all a matter of scale and the scale at which we resolve reality is not random. When we try stepping out of that scale, our observations become wonky and meaningless.
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 20:14:05 UTC No. 16063412
>>16063385
> I said randomness exists in scale. True randomness is just not there. It's all a matter of scale and the scale at which we resolve reality is not random.
I don't know what you mean by "scale" here. Can you elaborate?
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 20:15:36 UTC No. 16063414
>>16063412
Random is a measure of potential inaccuracy as well as accuracy, the scale of randomness is the margin between the two.
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 20:20:04 UTC No. 16063420
>>16063322
So, if I'm understanding you correctly (correct me if I'm not), your perspective is that quantum uncertainties are a result of fundamentally deterministic dynamic systems, but that it may not ever be possible to resolve these deterministic systems.
Why do you believe this? I understand the basics of non-linear dynamics, and have even taken courses on non-linear systems at a graduate level. I understand fractals to be able to produce really intricate and unpredictable behavior.
I am less convinced by the claims that "all systems with uncertainty can be uniquely represented by non-linear systems" that some people within the field make.
From my perspective as an engineer who works on nonlinear systems and non-linear estimation every day for a living, I don't see any reason to believe claims that all random systems are fundamentally chaotic systems. I believe that there are certainly a class of systems which were believed to be random which have been found to be chaotic (to some degree of precision) but I have very little reason to believe that all process uncertainties will prove to be ones which are driven by deterministic non-linear dynamics (even if completely unobservable).
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 20:37:24 UTC No. 16063471
>>16063346
>so you'd be able to predict which atom will decay next? tunneling event?
No, I think that's always going to be outside of realm of possibility. But if we can use an understanding of NLD to understand more about the underlying behavior, we may have more insight about how to make a decay more likely or make a tunneling event more probable.
>your perspective is that quantum uncertainties are a result of fundamentally deterministic dynamic systems, but that it may not ever be possible to resolve these deterministic systems.
I think it boils down to whether our understanding of NLD can get to a point where we can reliably model how a deterministic system of a particular type will translate a statistical ensemble of initial conditions into a statistical ensemble of resulting dynamics. The field is getting there - we can brute force systems governed by nonlinear differential equations and map out their responses in phase space, but the field's not yet to the point where you can do this for some arbitrary distribution of initial conditions and accurately predict what the distribution of results will be. I am convinced that it will get their eventually, and that that's going to be a watershed moment: Because if you can do that, then it's a much smaller leap to use a distribution of initial conditions and final conditions to reconstruct the underlying behavior.
To use a classical analogy, consider the relationship between meteorological observation and the fluid equations. Right now we make assumptions about the fluid equations, feed observations into those equations, and try to accurately predict the results. The more interesting application here (if our understanding of NLD can get to this point) would be taking the observations and results and using them to reconstruct the fluid equations governing the system and gaining insight about what approximations are reasonable or unreasonable, and use that to inform attempts to improve predictions.
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 20:42:22 UTC No. 16063482
>>16063471
To elaborate (again, through classical analogy). If I have something like a double pendulum with some particular lengths, moments, masses, etc., I can take a distribution of initial conditions, feed through through a simulation, and build a distribution of resulting dynamics. However, the mathematics isn't yet at the point where I can take a distribution and a non-linear differential equation describing the dynamics, and tell you a distribution for the outcome.
But if our understanding of the statistics of nonlinear systems gets to the point where that can be done without the many, many, many intermediary steps of brute forcing those calculations, you can start to use the initial and final conditions to reconstruct the underlying system, and use that understanding to inform what distribution of initial conditions yields a more desirable distribution of final conditions.
You're right though - it could turn out not to be possible, the mathematics may just not be there, and if that's the case then I think it'll be a shame, because it means there will probably be a lot of questions (and solutions) beyond our grasp.
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 20:43:23 UTC No. 16063485
>>16063482
>and tell you a distribution for the outcome*
*without taking those many, many intermediary steps.
Anonymous at Fri, 8 Mar 2024 21:17:36 UTC No. 16063567
>>16063471
>No, I think that's always going to be outside of realm of possibility.
>we may have more insight about how to make a decay more likely
those statements are kind of contradictory but anyway, is there ANYTHING that makes you think you could affect decay rate? any reason why you'd think that is possible?
seems like people are just pulling statements out of their asses, to fit their narrative.
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 03:44:09 UTC No. 16064274
i dont think we will ever know the true underlying metaphyics of universe. notions of true randomness are moot. who cares. imo has no implication for free will either.
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 03:53:09 UTC No. 16064281
>>16063567
>is there ANYTHING that makes you think you could affect decay rate
NTA, but there are certain decay processes where conditions *can* alter the decay rate of an isotope. though they're rare processes, IIRC.
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 04:11:12 UTC No. 16064319
You basically have to believe in some metaphysical gibberish like a soul in order to deny all self-determination. When people encounter the fact that behavior is largely influenced by things such as one's brain and genes they declare that free will doesn't exist because "you're" not making choices. What am I besides my biological constitution? My genes and brain are part of me. However, if you believe that the body is some sort of trap for the soul, and the soul is synonymous with the self, then the fact that the body reigns would mean that "you" have no agency because your soul (which is you) has no causal power. Of course, I am my body. My body determines its actions, which is to say that I determine myself, which is essentially what I understand as free will.
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 04:13:50 UTC No. 16064321
>>16062149
i don't have a big horse in this race because you don't need quantum mechanics to get non-determinism, but why did you post dr. sapolsky?
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 04:33:44 UTC No. 16064347
>>16062390
anthropogenic biases. human scale "intuition" takes over. at the very large and very small shits weird
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 04:37:32 UTC No. 16064358
>>16062149
when people talk about free will, its mostly semantic arguments.
clearly man is not entire free to do what he wants anytime he likes, so the "free" part is in question. however it seems man has some agency so there is evidently "will". its all bullshit at the end of the day, as ops pic proves
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 04:39:58 UTC No. 16064364
>>16064319
all you really need is like higher dimensions or some shit. arguably a higher plane isnt materially deterministic in any sense we can conceive, its jsut isnt "material" at all
but yea metaphysical gibberish, but guess what the universe is clearly full of that junk
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 04:41:29 UTC No. 16064370
>>16064358
> clearly man is not entirely free to do what he wants anytime he likes, so the "free" part is in question.
Determinists have argued against this straw man for generations now. The question for free will is not "does man have the ability to make any conceivable choice at any given time." The question is "given a set of options, does man have the ability to choose or was it predetermined and his feelings of choice were illusory?"
One doesn't need omnipotence or omniscience to have free will. All one needs is for the deterministic components of the physical mechanism to not be 100% explanatory for the decision mechanism. As soon as it is not deterministic, there is some element of something beyond the material that goes into perception and decision.
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 05:32:08 UTC No. 16064441
>>16063414
Stop pretending you are me, faggot.
>>16063412
Randomness exists in the quantum scale whereas where we live is ruled by determinism. Attempting to marry those two leads to all the problems we have in physics.
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 05:38:41 UTC No. 16064448
>>16064319
You might be your body, but you contributed nothing towards developing its mannerisms. Ultimately, nature and evolution own your body and has the final say on what happens to it or what traits it inherits. This retarded hubrisitc notion of ownership is what keeps you retarded midwits from seeing the truth. You dont own anything that nature can't take away or that evolution didn't already give you.
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 06:08:55 UTC No. 16064496
>>16064441
> Randomness exists in the quantum scale whereas where we live is ruled by determinism.
I don't think this really is a meaningful way to look at this idea. Anything at all that involves phase transitions, combustion, friction and the exchange of kinetic energy for physical via surface interactions, all involve randomness at "at the quantum scale" which produce measurable stochasticity.
You literally can't do a real undergrad level kinematics experiment like a mass-spring-damper setup without encountering "quantum level" randomness which contributes to uncertainties in your state evolution and measurements.
It isn't like these quantum level effects just magically go away when you are looking at interactions at scale. They are always there, just sometimes at a low enough level of significance that your measurment system may filter it out or you may not even be aware it's happening.
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 06:10:04 UTC No. 16064498
>>16064496
>>16064448
Kinetic energy for thermal* sorry it's late here and my brain isn't working well (as if it ever does).
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 06:29:27 UTC No. 16064510
>>16064448
So my body contributed nothing to the development of my body's mannerisms?
>The question is "given a set of options, does man have the ability to choose or was it predetermined and his feelings of choice were illusory?
This is a false dichotomy. The ability to choose is not undermined by the fact that that ability will be applied to a certain choice. Given a set of options, man clearly does, practically speaking, have the ability to choose. If he is presented with an apple and an orange, and he wills that he eats the apple and not the orange, he can. And if he wills he eat the orange and not the apple, he can do that too. This applies even in a completely deterministic universe.
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 06:30:28 UTC No. 16064513
>>16064510
>>16064370
forgot to actually (you) for second quote
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 06:39:28 UTC No. 16064518
>>16064510
That's not the point. There are people who are allergic to apples or oranges. Do they have a choice in this? What if you have diabetes. Yes he has will, but it isn't free, why is this concept so hard for you midwits to understand?
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 06:59:03 UTC No. 16064537
>>16064510
> And if he wills he eat the orange and not the apple, he can do that too. This applies even in a completely deterministic universe.
No, you don't quite understand. The "free will" vs "determinism" discussion relating to choice is exactly divided on this line. Strict determinism is to believe that there is no "will" involved in the choice. It was entirely a matter of chemistry and physical interactions within the brain and there is no "agent" beyond our own illusory perception. We are but biological computing machines who have no "will" beyond the expression of these neurochemical interactions via a false identity of "person hood."
To believe in free will is to believe that there is something more to human intelligence and agency (and not necessarily just human, but more particularly human for most cases) and that the biological computer is not a sufficient explanation for the decision process and experience of reality.
Sapolsky, and other strict determinists, argue that to know the decision you solely need to know the state of the brain. There is nothing else to know, it's just chemistry, physics and physiology. There isn't anything immaterial involved. It is all just neurochemistry all the way down.
They make this claim based on the idea that the physical world is itself deterministic and as a result, the brain as a material object must be deterministic as well.
The problems are two-fold. The one that is the most egregious to me is that the physical world actually isn't meaningfully deterministic. On top of this, having a deterministic material world doesn't guarantee you deterministic consciousness if consciousness has some immaterial component (still an open question).
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 07:02:05 UTC No. 16064541
>>16064518
As I stated earlier, your standard for "free will" appears to be omnipotence rather than agency. You're fighting a straw man against a belief nobody has.
Free will doesn't necessitate that you can will yourself out of a food allergy any more than it necessitates you being able to will yourself into living in the past/distant future.
It just necessitates that the choices you make are your own. They may be influenced by biology, physics, and chemistry, but they are not sufficient to fully characterize your experience and accurately determine your decision process for any actual choice you have to make.
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 07:13:08 UTC No. 16064554
>>16064518
>There are people who are allergic to apples or oranges. Do they have a choice in this? What if you have diabetes. Yes he has will, but it isn't free, why is this concept so hard for you midwits to understand?
Yeah, but they might be suicidal. The choice is theirs.
>Strict determinism is to believe that there is no "will" involved in the choice. It was entirely a matter of chemistry and physical interactions within the brain and there is no "agent" beyond our own illusory perception.
The problem wouldn't go away if there's an immaterial component. Instead of arguing about quantum coherence in axons or whatever you'd have people arguing about whether aetheroplasmic sheets in the soul resonate orthogonally to astral emanations or whatever the fuck.
the ACTUAL dilemma here is that some people take "will" to mean something along the lines of "a propensity of a conscious being to commit to a certain action" and other people don't think that that captures the emotional significance of what THEY mean by will. They usually can't tell you what they do mean, and when they do it's usually nonsense, but they think that there must be something so significant that it can't possibly be so ordinary as a property of a causal system.
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 07:13:34 UTC No. 16064555
>>16064541
You are the one who is fighting definition. If that was all free will then why differentiate it from will? Your simple example hides huge legal implications of this notion. Let's assume someone is born a psychopath, do they have the free will to contain their murderous rage and hence not be held responsible by the state? Or do we simply call it will no different from choosing a cheese burger over rice and beans? Which is which here?
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 07:18:36 UTC No. 16064562
>>16064537
>>16064554
I did it again fuck
>>16064555
We can (and should) have conversations about morality and legal theory without having to bring the skub that is "free will" into it.
Why should people not be held responsible for their natures? If you have two murderers in front of me, and tell me that one is intrinsically murderous and the other isn't, and I could only choose to lock up one, I'd go with the intrinsically murderous one (well, I'd want more details, but that's the choice I'd make if that were the only info I got.) Insanity as a legal defense isn't about whether someone has "free will," it's about whether they can understand the morality involved in what they're doing. If they can't, then there's no point in "punishing" them by throwing them in prison, since punishment is a moral reprimand, you just throw them in a mental hospital instead.
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 07:23:32 UTC No. 16064564
>>16062172
I knew this was going to be a Justin Riddle video before even opening the link
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 07:27:44 UTC No. 16064569
>>16064562
Ok now let's talk about someone who was afraid that their mother might die and so stole something to pay her medical bills. They destroyed a shop while doing it and partially injured an attendant who now requires medical attention and money for repairs. Is the thief responsible for his crimes? Will jailing him prevent other people from doing the same when they don't have any other recourse? We can not talk about morality without assuming free will. If you deny free will then you have to deny morality too, you can't eat your cake and have it.
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 07:35:45 UTC No. 16064571
>>16062149
Even if QM is random, your brain depends on QM and not the other way around you stupid nigger.
It wouldn't imply free will, it would imply random will.
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 07:35:59 UTC No. 16064573
>>16064569
>Will jailing him prevent other people from doing the same when they don't have any other recourse?
Probably not but retributive justice was never about preventing crime. It's about making people feel good about doing bad things to bad people, and the masses don't care that much about the underlying philosophy. It probably scares enough people into not committing crimes to justify itself as a cultural practice, in addition to literally taking criminals off the streets. Nuances like "I did it to save my dying mother" are the kind of things that might get a lesser sentence in more kind-hearted societies, but in general most people would probably say the thief had a responsibility to find the money in a more socially acceptable way.
>We can not talk about morality without assuming free will.
I manage. People are responsible for their actions. The fact that the responsibility comes from inside their skulls and not a registry on the Celestial Blockchain makes certain matters messier, but the responsibility is usually still there.
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 07:46:58 UTC No. 16064586
>>16064573
>, but in general most people would probably say the thief had a responsibility to find the money in a more socially acceptable way.
They would say that but it doesn't solve anything. The same people would do the same if presented with a similar conundrum. This has been demonstrated in dozens of psychological trials where people become immoral as soon they detect no one is watching them.
>I manage. People are responsible for their actions. The fact that the responsibility comes from inside their skulls and not a registry on the Celestial Blockchain makes certain matters messier, but the responsibility is usually still there.
Again, this doesn't prove free will is the same as will. Or that morality is independent of that. You can be responsible for your actions, it doesn't mean that you have automatically become more moral or that your struggles on choosing what is right are done.
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 07:55:28 UTC No. 16064600
>>16064586
>They would say that but it doesn't solve anything. The same people would do the same if presented with a similar conundrum. This has been demonstrated in dozens of psychological trials where people become immoral as soon they detect no one is watching them.
I think I agree with you but my opinions on justice system reform are unrelated to my opinions on free will. Or at least, I don't see a clear line connecting them.
>Again, this doesn't prove free will is the same as will.
No, but I think you'd have a hard time proving will is or isn't the same thing as free will by ANY reasoning. If you pay attention to conversations on free will, you'll notice that different people seem to be using the word to mean different things. The strange part is that each will insist the other is *wrong* instead of trying to engage with the different concepts they're actually trying to talk about.
The debate around free will is mired in a uniquely suffocating form of confusion, where most people don't even seem to realize anyone's confused. Which is why, in general, I like to avoid it when I can, especially when talking about *actually important things* like morality. If you think that "free will" is a concept inseparable from morality, I'd rather you use a different name for that concept, one that gives us at least a fighting chance of understanding what we each mean by the things we say.
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 08:07:15 UTC No. 16064612
>>16064600
It's very simple, will is what every living thing does effortlessly, from having sex to walking to work, etc. Free will is the notion that you have the ability to choose those actions. The two are mired by everyday language about democracy and freedom. It's the difference btn formal language and casual language that even people as far back as Schopenhauer understood. To be moral is to have the free will to always choose the right actions, I don't understand why this is so difficult. If you had free will you could always choose what was right, you could ignore the pain of losing your loved ones and walk away from temptations, you could interrupt your survival instincts and be moral without even the prior first hand experience humans require to do this. There would be no moral struggle whatsoever.
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 08:16:11 UTC No. 16064627
>>16064612
>I don't understand why this is so difficult.
It's difficult because you're using words in a way that makes perfect sense to you, but in my life I've had or read dozens of conversations of different people using the same words in completely different ways that made complete sense to THEM, so by the time I get to you the words are ruined. Nobody ever checks that they're on the same page when talking about free will, for some reason. I guess you can say that all communication comes down to assuming your conversational partner understands you; I can say "the sky is blue" without having to check in with you to make sure you know what "sky" and "blue" are. But on the other hand, nobody ever has extremely heated and philosophically sloppy arguments about the blueness of the sky, and that happens with free will literally all the time.
In this case, if I had to guess the point that's most important here, I'd say you probably have a good idea of what you mean by "the ability to choose", but I don't know what you mean, because different people will think of "the ability to choose" as OBVIOUSLY meaning something in particular, but then they end up thinking it obviously means a bunch of completely different, tangentially related things.
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 08:25:55 UTC No. 16064639
>>16064627
Ability to choose means exactly what it implies. Say you have a murderer in your house and you are hungry too, you have just come home from a 2-day shift at work and haven't eaten anything all day. Do you have the choice to respond to hunger or the threat in your house? Is this choice up to you as an individual with a deluded sense of freedom or is it up to evolution which has endowed you with all the survival information that saved everyone prior to your birth? This information is read only, you can't change it, it comes with the package btw.
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 08:34:29 UTC No. 16064650
>>16064639
>Ability to choose means exactly what it implies.
Of course it does. YOU use "ability to choose" to mean exactly what implies to YOU. But for some reason, language is unstable in this region of concept-space, and there's no guarantee that it implies the same thing to me.
For instance, I would say that you do have the ability to choose which to deal with first, the hunger of the murderer, but (ignoring edge cases) you are guaranteed to choose to first deal with the murderer. To me, this seems like the obvious interpretation. Many other people (maybe including you, I can't tell, which is my point) would say that if you're guaranteed to deal with the murderer first, you can't have ever had the ability to choose, and that's so obvious to them that me saying otherwise means that I'm either trolling or insane.
We probably agree on most of the basic facts here, and I'm guessing on a lot of the more subtle and subjective aspects as well. But if our language disagrees, it's very hard to uncover that fact.
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 08:45:29 UTC No. 16064666
>>16064650
You don't know he is a murderer though, on the other hand you do know that if you don't eat soon you might collapse. The evolutionary mechanism doesn't care what assumptions you have made, it just resorts to the most probable outcome. So you can't have the ability to choose. It actually bypasses reason and this has been demonstrated time and again. When responding to threats, your conscious brain shuts down, so you can't argue about choice and reasoning here.
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 08:50:25 UTC No. 16064672
>>16064666
I think of my subconscious mind as still being "me." So, I'm still making a choice, just not with the part of me that I usually like to make choices with.
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 08:57:19 UTC No. 16064685
>>16064370
>The question is "given a set of options, does man have the ability to choose or was it predetermined and his feelings of choice were illusory?"
exactly what i mean by a bunch of semantic bullshit. you have to start going into the ontology of choice, illusions, feelings, events, etc.
in the end the words just stop having any meaning
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 08:57:55 UTC No. 16064686
>>16064672
That part of you is not in your control, which is why regret and suffering is a thing. So you don't have choice, it might be part of you but you don't have any choice over how it works.
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 12:52:33 UTC No. 16064881
>>16062149
no, it isn't. in order to have free will you need indeterminism (randomness) PLUS idealism (your choice-making mind precedes physics, it decides which choice is made, not the physics).
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 12:57:30 UTC No. 16064886
>>16064881
>your choice-making mind precedes physics
>there's magic involved
nice paper faggot
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 13:57:46 UTC No. 16064942
https://youtu.be/0y6pnleNjiI
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 14:01:01 UTC No. 16064951
>>16064685
> Semantic bullshit like ontology of choice
The ontology of choice is literally what the whole "free will vs. determinism" is about dude. What do you think is going in these conversations/debates?
Sapolsky argues specifically that because we know material factors influence perception and influence consciousness, and we "know that macrophysical interactions are deterministic" then choices made as a combination of these two factors must be deterministic. That's literally the whole debate.
My objection to his perspective is that we don't have any reason to believe that macrophysical interactions are actually properly deterministic in any form except possibly on the average. Thus, if your argument about the ontology of choice being deterministic relies on this notion of physical determinism, you are in trouble.
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 14:09:07 UTC No. 16064957
>>16064685
>>16064951
To be clear, I'm not sure if I believe properly in free will.
If anything I'd say I believe in something like indeterminism and I still think all of the metaphysics of choice/consciousness/etc. are still very much open questions.
It could be the case that this indeterminism does in fact imply some free will/agency that is immaterial in the same way that mathematical logic is immaterial. It could also be the case that whatever consciousness is exists in some odd miasma that works out to be deterministic on the average but is in truth some sort of stochastic process where we have little observability into the actual "choice function" that goes from indeterminate potential choices to human agency.
We don't know. What we can be pretty certain of is that arguments for determinism relying on physical/causal determinism don't work because causal determinism isn't true for particular instantiation of physical interactions. If it's true at all, it only appears to be true in an expected value sort of sense.
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 15:45:17 UTC No. 16065078
>>16064951
>sapolsky argues
and then he goes on to say "and therefore we should do x and y because we have no free will". like ok bro stfu
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 16:09:01 UTC No. 16065107
>>16064951
>The ontology of choice is literally what the whole "free will vs. determinism" is about dude
not entirely, like you have to figure out what a choice even is before you say it doesnt exist broheim
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 19:02:05 UTC No. 16065307
>>16064886
that's what free will proponents believe in, magic. don't shoot the messenger
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 19:41:57 UTC No. 16065370
>>16062309
>Randomness and Free Will are incongruent.
No-they aren't. Right of the bat, consciousness is not made out of matter or energy. Consciousness is not a physical object. It can not be objectively observed like physical stuff can. Subjective, first person experience is just as the name implies, ie SUBJECTIVE, not objective. A thought/consciousness has no position or momentum or those objective quantifiables, and so whether physicality is "random" or "determined" makes no difference in the argument. It's a red herring. It per-supposes that consciousness is an objective physical object. The brain is not consciousness. The brain only represents, in some cases, a CORRELATED (not causative) constraint on consciousness, based on INTERFACE between objective brains and subjective consciousnesses. And so what ever is causing consciousness is also consciousness (consciousness is fundamental, not matter) and so there fore it is not physical, and so therefore physicalism is false, and so therefore whether the physical world are "random" or determined" is irrelevant. Free will simply IS, as an ontological fundament of the reality as Schrödinger figured out.
Anonymous at Sat, 9 Mar 2024 19:52:41 UTC No. 16065389
>>16063068
Your opinion can safely be discarded, being that you have no ability to freely choose between the available, competing theories. You were programed to believe what yo believe and come to the conclusions you come to. In fact, we all were. And nobody can conclude anything freely or get outside of the system to access the output of the machine. And you can't appeal to some other machine (person) to verify the data/theory either. They they are also withing the closed, determined system. There is not truth that can be declared, which is itself a contradictory statement.