[HN Gopher] Does chaos theory square classical physics with huma...
___________________________________________________________________
Does chaos theory square classical physics with human agency?
Author : rbanffy
Score : 22 points
Date : 2024-06-13 15:26 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (aeon.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (aeon.co)
| mrsilencedogood wrote:
| Is this not just soft determinism?
|
| I've always felt like soft determinists were just people who
| really wanted "free will" but couldn't see enough uncertainty in
| the unexplored realms of physics to see how the universe isn't
| fully deterministic (if very difficult to simulate or make
| predictions that match reality beyond a few seconds). So instead
| they just redefined free will in a "this is fine [room is on
| fire]" kind of way.
|
| Either the universe is fully deterministic and free will and
| agency do not exist, and we should be much kinder to people who
| e.g. commit crimes (they were forced to do it by their brain
| state, after all).
|
| Or the universe is not fully deterministic, and we are going to
| eventually find some (or many) fundamental source of non-
| deterministic behavior.
|
| Now mind you, whether that non-deterministic behavior actually
| happens _in our brains_ in a way that it provides some kind of
| metaphorical "door" for our soul, or our true selves, or
| whatever you might call it, to propagate through meaningfully
| into our consciousnesses in a way that will make whether we are a
| sinner or a saint some actual function of whether "we" are
| "good". Now that remains to be seen.
|
| Wouldn't it be funny if we found that truly non-deterministic
| behavior happens at the event horizons of black holes, or in the
| middle of the fusion of a star, or something crazily exotic like
| that. And definitely doesn't happen at standard temperature and
| pressure in our brains.
| parpfish wrote:
| i've never understood why free will fits into discussions about
| deterministic vs random universes. in either situation, there
| isn't room for free will -- if things are deterministic your
| decisions are made by the state of the world at t-1, if things
| are random your decisions are made by coin flips.
|
| the more i've thought about this over the years, the less
| clearly i've been able to define what precisely 'free will'
| would mean in terms of a physical system or causality
| mrsilencedogood wrote:
| Agreed, there are to "steps" we need.
|
| First, we need the universe to not literally just be a
| function of the previous state and the current time.
|
| Second, we need (and I'm quoting myself from above to
| illustrate what I meant): "some kind of metaphorical "door"
| for our soul, or our true selves, or whatever you might call
| it, to propagate through meaningfully into our
| consciousnesses".
|
| Lacking the first means there's no way for the second to
| exist. Supposing the first exists, we then need it to provide
| some kind of way for the "us" that exists outside of physics
| or as an emergent phenomenon out of the nondeterministic
| parts of physics to meaningfully shape what our brain's
| electrical states make us do.
|
| If we have all of that, we finally have the beginnings of a
| system in which we can start to try to philosophically assign
| moral designations to actions and people. Which is think is
| about 50% of the reason people want free will to exist: so we
| can punish others for their actions.
|
| (And just to clarify, to anyone not familiar with how people
| usually debate philosophy. It's all about your presupposed
| axioms. Things you and your partner agree to be true. This
| kind of discussion is one that presupposes relatively little,
| so don't think I'm trying to make political claims about how
| crime shouldn't be punished or whatever. I'm simply saying
| that if we presuppose only that the universe is not
| deterministic, that alone doesn't bring us forward enough to
| start building a system of ethics.)
| lupire wrote:
| That's the point. Free will is a metaphysical concept that
| posits the existence of a soul outside physics.
|
| Randomness in physics is a peephole through which the non
| physical world can interact with physics. Think of it like a
| game where you get control the RNG output for some rolls.
| AngryData wrote:
| Yeah I share the same stance. Im not sure there is even a
| point in knowing or caring about freewill regardless of
| whether it exists or not or is just some completely
| meaningless abstract concept.
|
| At the end of the day, im still going to act like me. From
| what I can imagine the most knowing the answer could ever
| accomplish is induce existential crisis in some people.
| naasking wrote:
| > in either situation, there isn't room for free will -- if
| things are deterministic your decisions are made by the state
| of the world at t-1, if things are random your decisions are
| made by coin flips.
|
| Yes, but what does this have to do with free will as most
| people understand the term? They want to be responsible for
| their choices, but this is compatible with a deterministic
| universe.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > They want to be responsible for their choices, but this
| is compatible with a deterministic universe.
|
| This is a controversial claim. How can someone be
| responsible for something they have no control over? I'd
| agree that's possible, but I don't think that's how most
| people understand it.
| naasking wrote:
| > This is a controversial claim. How can someone be
| responsible for something they have no control over?
|
| The Frankfurt cases showed that control over alternate
| possibilities is not necessary for responsibility. If
| someone holds a gun to your head to make you do something
| that you were going to do anyway, that's not really
| compromising your free will is it?
|
| Edit: it's also not really as controversial as you might
| think, experimental philosophy has demonstrated that most
| lay people's moral reasoning aligns with Compatibilism:
| https://philarchive.org/rec/ANDWCI-3
| guerrilla wrote:
| It's exactly as controversial as I think because I think
| it's as controversial as we have measured.
| https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/4838
|
| Lay people are incoherent and childishly naive. I don't
| really care what they think.
|
| > The Frankfurt cases showed that control over alternate
| possibilities is not necessary for responsibility.
|
| This is a controversial claim. There are many popular
| counterarguments.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| You a free to make choices in a deterministic universe.
| It was just always going to be the choice you made.
|
| Introducing randomness just eliminates that determanism,
| not the ability to choose.
| jerf wrote:
| Yesterday I complained that telepathy is defined solely as a
| negative, which means that it essentially can't exist because
| if it is ever found, it will be real, and as such, will have
| mechanisms and limitations and real characteristics, and
| therefore it can't be "real telepathy". Because the
| definition is intrinsically built on negation.
| def isItTelepathy(anything): return False
|
| A lot of obfuscatory words are thrown at the definition, but
| it's what it amounts to.
|
| Or, more fairly, this is not the only definition but it's a
| very popular one.
|
| Free will has a similar problem. The definition a lot of
| people want to use is a negative one. It can't involve any
| predictable process. It can't involve any seen process. And
| so on. Well, when you feed a definition like the above into
| logic, you get some pretty broken answers.
|
| Some people do give definitions that can be turned into real
| answers, but you can detect someone operating on the
| completely-negative definition by the way they get upset,
| sometimes even in a moralistic way, at the idea that you
| might have said something meaningful and insist on pushing
| their total-negation definition at you again.
|
| There's an interesting conversation to be had on the matter
| in potentia but it requires so much effort sidelining the
| people who become offended if you actually proffer a
| definition and hold to it and perform actual logic on it that
| it's hardly worth it. So we pretty much get nowhere because
| we are essentially not _allowed_ by about 80% of the people
| trying to have the conversation to have a concrete definition
| at all, not even for a moment, not even "for the sake of
| argument".
| snowwrestler wrote:
| The only way to satisfy extreme notions of free will is to
| introduce supernatural agency, e.g. a soul granted by God.
| This way your choices are neither physically pre-determined,
| nor random.
|
| And in fact when you dig deep into discussions with some
| people, it becomes clear that defending and proselytizing the
| existence of a soul (or similar supernatural concept) is in
| fact their goal in discussing free will in the first place.
| They think it's a useful way to back into their preferred
| version of spirituality, or they think it's the logical
| resolution to the contradiction you've highlighted, or maybe
| both.
| kulahan wrote:
| I assume that for some, the soul is an analogy for free
| will, which is why it's so hard for them to separate the
| ideas
| card_zero wrote:
| Nah. People who get het up about free will are just making some
| conceptual error, which I think goes like this;
|
| 1. Machines don't have free will.
|
| 2. If my brain is explained by conventional physics, it's a
| mechanism.
|
| 3. But I have free will!
|
| 4. So there's something wrong with physics.
|
| But the mistake is in step 1, machines _can_ have free will -
| at least, we do, so QED and STFU.
|
| Why can't free will be deterministic? What does randomness have
| to do with anything? This is about _thought._
| joelfried wrote:
| Many would say you can't have free will in a deterministic
| world because free will is about selecting one option from
| many. If there is no alternative option -- because the
| universe is completely determined -- how can you have any
| choice? You were always going to do exactly what it was
| previously determined you were always going to do.
| card_zero wrote:
| They want "agency", which means something like looking at
| the universe and interfering with it without being part of
| it, like a scientist with the universe in a petri dish,
| somehow external to any universe and not subject to any
| rules or causality.
|
| It's a bizarre but apparently intuitive wish. But this
| isn't necessary. A robot can select one option from among
| many. We can predict the robots choice. A human can do the
| same, and we can't predict the human's choice so well,
| because humans are deep and complex and actually think, but
| it's still a mechanism, and so what? The error here is in
| thinking that "mechanism = robot" and "mechanism = amoral",
| neither of which are true - except for all the _non-human_
| mechanisms, which is the great majority of the mechanisms
| (processes, etc.) that we see, and we don 't like being
| lumped in with them in case it makes us robots and removes
| responsibility for choices. But it just doesn't.
| lupire wrote:
| And yet, knowing that free will does not exist can change
| someone's whole life trajectory. So free will is a useful
| delusion. But we can't control if we get to have the
| delusion. It's not surprising if this like of reasoning
| seems familiar.
| card_zero wrote:
| Free will does exist, deterministic agency exists, and
| reasoning that determinism removes moral responsibility
| is an error. What doesn't exist is this metaphysical type
| of god-like beyond-universe agency that people obsess
| over for no obvious reason.
| lisper wrote:
| Free will is not a delusion it is an illusion. The
| difference is significant. Illusions are normal sensory
| perceptions common across nearly all humans that just
| happen not to correspond to anything in physical reality.
| naasking wrote:
| > Many would say you can't have free will in a
| deterministic world because free will is about selecting
| one option from many. If there is no alternative option --
| because the universe is completely determined -- how can
| you have any choice?
|
| Because "select 1 option among many" is not what's meant by
| free will and not how anyone serious understands the term.
| If someone is holding a gun to your head and telling you to
| choose option X, which is an option that you would NOT
| otherwise choose, you still have a choice by your
| definition, because you can choose to die or choose to
| accede to those demands. No one would agree that you have a
| freely willed choice though. Clearly you're missing some
| important ingredient, and this extra bit is why free will
| is compatible with determinism.
| lolinder wrote:
| Some people in those situations have absolutely chosen to
| get shot, which means that true determinism functions
| differently than a metaphorical gun. You might not be
| morally culpable for what you do while under threat of
| death, but that's a separate question from whether you
| could physically have done something different.
|
| In a deterministic universe there isn't a gun to your
| head, instead what you will do was decided by the
| configuration of atoms immediately after the Big Bang
| (and presumably by the configuration of whatever the heck
| came before). In a deterministic universe I do what I do
| because particles hit into each other in particular ways
| over countless eons and those particle interactions
| eventually coalesced into what I call myself and the
| particles in my brain bounce in particular ways that
| interact to create an illusion of choice.
| naasking wrote:
| > You might not be morally culpable for what you do while
| under threat of death, but that's a separate question
| from whether you could physically have done something
| different.
|
| The principle of alternate possibilities was debunked by
| the Frankfurt cases, and that was not the point of the
| gun scenario.
|
| The point was that nobody would consider a person acting
| under threat of death to be making freely willed choices,
| so defining choice in the naive and reductive sense that
| was suggested is just incorrect because it cannot exclude
| this case. Therefore this naive and reductive definition
| cannot be what people mean by "choice" in the context of
| free will.
|
| > In a deterministic universe I do what I do because
| particles hit into each other in particular ways over
| countless eons and those particle interactions eventually
| coalesced into what I call myself and the particles in my
| brain bounce in particular ways that interact
|
| So an intelligent being was created with certain
| preferences and values, and as long as this being was
| able to deliberate and make choices in accordance with
| those preferences and values, that being was making
| freely willed choices. How this being was able to do this
| at the subatomic level is completely irrelevant, and
| bringing it up is, at best, a category error.
| awwaiid wrote:
| A useful illusion of Free Will is that we can to some degree
| predict the future state of the world and influence the future
| state of the world. To make meaningful agent type activity you
| have to have a world full of causality, in other words --- and
| to have causality it is awfully nice to have some deterministic
| properties (or science might not work out so well). So! I for
| one am a hard-compatiblist. I think that not only is "useful
| free-will" aka Agency compatible with determinism, I think that
| determinism is necessary!
|
| (concepts probably stolen or bad copies of Daniel Dennett
| models)
| mrsilencedogood wrote:
| It's clear that huge swathes of physics are deterministic! Or
| at least anything non-deterministic is on a small-enough
| order that we can still build rockets and keep clocks on
| satellites and earth in sync.
|
| And I agree that a world completely free of causality would
| be a useless world. But I think that a world that is
| completely closed under physics and completely deterministic
| isn't compatible with a "free will" that could support a
| system of ethics, which I think is where a lot of people then
| want to take the "does free will exist" argument once they
| figure out the first part. So it's a matter of threading the
| needle.
| lupire wrote:
| Compatibilitism is the the theory that player characters
| (conscious people)and NPCs (philosophical zombies) are morally
| equivalent. That the inability to see someone's (even your
| own!) inner motivating state means that it's equivalent to free
| will in all practical senses.
|
| In other words, "The difference between theory and practice is
| that, in theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice,
| they are not", and all the paradox that entails.
| card_zero wrote:
| The idea of philosophical zombies has something in common
| with solipsism, which is where _everybody_ else is a zombie,
| and hey, maybe the universe is a simulation too. But the
| argument against this is that if the universe (and its
| population) is _perfectly_ simulated, then it 's exactly
| equivalent to real, and that means it _is_ real - or the
| zombie is a real person, if we 're just discussing one
| "perfectly simulated" person. Otherwise, if the simulation is
| just _very very good,_ we 're talking about something less
| relevant to arguments.
| naasking wrote:
| > Compatibilitism is the the theory that player characters
| (conscious people)and NPCs (philosophical zombies) are
| morally equivalent.
|
| Compatibilism has literally nothing to say about
| consciousness. It's a completely orthogonal question. There's
| nothing incoherent about deterministic p-zombies or non-
| deterministic p-zombies, nor is there anything incoherent
| about deterministic conscious people or non-deterministic
| conscious people.
| mannykannot wrote:
| > Either the universe is fully deterministic and free will and
| agency do not exist, and we should be much kinder to people who
| e.g. commit crimes (they were forced to do it by their brain
| state, after all)...
|
| I don't think that's consistent, as the same reasoning applies
| to the people (i.e. the 'we' in your statement) who will, in
| some way or perhaps not at all, censure the perpetrator of said
| crime.
|
| In other words, if full determinism removes agency from the
| perpetrator, then it also removes it from everyone else.
| foolswisdom wrote:
| Additionally, the possibility of consequences (including
| those created and enforced by human beings, formal or
| otherwise) are also factors in the "deterministic" action of
| an individual, so for the benefit of society (assuming there
| are outcomes that society can improve via expectations and
| consequences) then it makes perfect sense for there to be
| consequences.
|
| Bottom line though, whether the system is deterministic or
| not doesn't affect our experience of it.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > In other words, if full determinism removes agency from the
| perpetrator, then it also removes it from everyone else.
|
| This is irrelevant to their claim. Normative statements don't
| require anyone actually have agency. After all, it's possible
| that everyone should do something that nobody can do.
|
| If you want to say that fine then their claim is irrelevant
| too, then sure, but it's in no way inconsistent. I think it
| is relevant though. We can do things differently than we do
| them, like after reading this comment section; we just can't
| do them differently than we will do.
|
| Worse still. Your guilty of the same thing you're accusing
| the poster of.
| mannykannot wrote:
| Are you sure about that? I don't think I'm taking issue
| with a normative claim here, I think I'm discussing the
| rationale offered for adopting it, which is where agency
| came into the discussion.
|
| I agree that I _am_ doing the same thing as the person I am
| replying to, just applying it to all participants (which,
| by the way, is not in any way an accusation.)
| kulahan wrote:
| Perhaps we're on our way to the inevitable outcome of
| being much nicer to criminals by pure coincidence of
| determinism :)
| Barrin92 wrote:
| free will and agency are two very different terms. Free will is
| a philosophically charged term that is often incoherent or ill
| defined, agency is fairly straight forward, it's the capacity
| of any actor to realize their goals and act autonomously in
| their own interest. It's the ability to shape your surroundings
| rather than be shaped by them.
|
| There's plenty of agency in a deterministic universe, a
| dictator with a nuke has a lot more of it than a slave in a
| cage. There's no need to be nicer to criminals on grounds that
| the universe is deterministic, which it is. (both in Newtonian
| physics and quantum mechanics). The nice guy is as
| deterministic as the criminal. None of them are "forced to do"
| anything by their brain state, there is no subject that is
| puppeteered around by your brain like some reverse dualism, you
| and I _are_ our brains (and bodies). What matters is if you
| want criminals to have more agency, and if you don 't, you
| punish them.
| criddell wrote:
| > What matters is if you want criminals to have more agency,
| and if you don't, you punish them.
|
| In a deterministic universe, "want" doesn't mean much. That
| you would _decide_ to punish a criminal is the only thing
| that could happen.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| No, again this is the same fallacy. Wants, needs, desires
| and preferences mean exactly what they meant before you
| figured out that the universe is deterministic. The
| misconception is simply not understanding that these are
| conceptual properties of material agents, not metaphysical
| claims about causality.
|
| You wanted an ice cream five minutes ago, reading a book
| about determinism didn't change that want. We actually do
| want to punish criminals and therefore we should do it.
| Whether we all run on cellular automata at the bottom
| levels of physics is just completely irrelevant to
| discussing human interaction.
| monkeycantype wrote:
| my brain holds a set of values, I rely on deterministic physics
| for them to be expressed through my decisions and actions, I do
| not want a magic quantum 8-ball meddling in the middle
|
| Who I am aligns with what I do _because_ the universe is
| deterministic.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-06-14 23:01 UTC)