Photons, Quasars and the Possibility of Free Will

[Teleros]

The definition you posted means exactly what I said, as I think you realize. Not determined by past events = not deterministic.

But then you want to add "or by random (un-caused) events", and that completly changes the definition, in fact it doesn't change it it destroys it, because the meaningful bit of the definition is at the end. Everything is either caused by something, or random, by definition (it is what the words mean).

Well, we don't know how the soul works, although I think it fair to say that, because you cannot be moral without the capacity to make choices, it cannot work in a deterministic (ie think clockwork or classical physics) manner. I suspect also that it cannot work in a truly random manner either, because in that case the decision to sin or not would come down to a roll of the dice so to speak, which again doesn't say much as regards making moral choices*.

*If you want to wind up an avowed atheist at Thanksgiving next year, explain to them that if God doesn't exist, neither can free will, and therefore Hitler did nothing wrong. Of course he also did nothing right, because everything's deterministic and we're running on metaphorical rails from the moment of the Big Bang, but you don't need to mention that part . Note that I am not responsible for any food thrown your way ...

Your altered definition is the same as saying free will is "The capacity for an agent to make choices", which is a very poor definition since it doesn't explain what making a choice is.

No it's not, because if nothing else it still precludes the deterministic option.

Well, it's not really a quibble, since if we assume that it is possible to see the future, AND (very important) that the act of watching the future does not change it then that necessarily means that the universe is deterministic and there are no true random events on our scale.

Uhm, yeah I think my example might have opened up a can of worms. If the choice is down to a random / causeless event that doesn't happen the second time, that sounds like your time travel is either impossible or more like hopping between multiverses or something. So bad example, as you say there's certainly a possibility of the random stuff not being random, so let's chuck it.

Here's what I hope is a better scenario. Imagine that you can view & comprehend the whole of space and time simultaneously, whilst being outside of time yourself (perhaps like God?), and being disconnected from everything - watching things will not change them, for example. In that case, because the random / causeless events occur in time, and you are outside of it, you're in a position to see the random event occur, and the consequences of it, all at once. You can simultaneously observe what's going on in my head before and after the random event.

And of course if watching the future means changing it, then what you saw is not the future and there is still no contradiction.

True enough.

So I think what scientifics who search for the impact of those random events on our brain look at is a way our brain is harnessing those random rare events, for example to create consciousness.

Whilst I hardly have any issue with them digging into this stuff, I have to wonder how much of it is trying to find a natural explanation for a supernatural phenomenon. Hopefully they find out some cool stuff though.

How would such a harnessing take place ?

Like I said, it would have to be a structure very sensitive to some kind of weird quantum behaviour, that causes a positive feedback loop. Without the sensitivity your brain will just ignore it, and without the positive feedback loop... well, moving a single electron won't do diddly on its own.

This is still a mistery, but my intuition tells me that if those scientists are on to something, then this "quantic consciousness" is the fruit of evolution

Without a spiritual explanation it has to be the result of evolution . As an aside, I'd also take issue with the idea of consciousness being something science will tell us much about*, but that might be getting a bit off topic.

*Very briefly, if consciousness is a purely materialistic phenomenon, and our brains are essentially just computers, then that SC2 AI you just thrashed was conscious to some degree. I realise that this is partly why scientists are trying to use quantum mechanics as the dividing line, but the principle is still pretty similar.

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First sentence and i was already checked out. Science has nothing to do with free will, that's the domain of philosophy, and scientists most definitly don't say that.

Don't you find it fun when they do it though?

Free will or not is not the product of biology. You have the ability to resist your urges. If you see a sexy woman that you really want to bang you don't jump her in a corner. If anything our choices are dictated by survival, but then again there's people who commit suicide. So, no. We definitly have free will, and it's built through our individual experiences.

In a materialistic universe though, free will is absolutely the product of biology. Something something you develop consciousness, along with the ability to resist urges. Then because of evolution or the plasticity of the brain or something things go wrong (eg suicide) etc.

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Science has something to do with everything

Oooh no. Science is perhaps better called by its old name, natural philosophy, which should give you a clue as to its limits - for example, the super-natural is by definition beyond the domain of science, as is morality (you cannot derive ought from is). However, you can - and should - use reason and logic to explore other domains of knowledge. I'm not sure there is any kind of knowledge that cannot be explored, explained and so on using reason and logic.

Maybe I'm being pedantic here, but I do think it's very important to recognise the limits of any field of knowledge.

[Adam Jensen]

Oooh no. Science is perhaps better called by its old name, natural philosophy, which should give you a clue as to its limits - for example, the super-natural is by definition beyond the domain of science, as is morality (you cannot derive ought from is). However, you can - and should - use reason and logic to explore other domains of knowledge. I'm not sure there is any kind of knowledge that cannot be explored, explained and so on using reason and logic.

Maybe I'm being pedantic here, but I do think it's very important to recognise the limits of any field of knowledge.

Seeing as how there's no such thing as the supernatural, we can rule that out.

[Shadowferal]

Seeing as how there's no such thing as the supernatural, we can rule that out.

Your o-so-human opinion...which is obviously predicated upon an omniscience that I find unbelievable.
Until you know everything about reality, I suggest against ruling anything out.

Humility is always better than hubris.

[Adam Jensen]

Your o-so-human opinion...which is obviously predicated upon an omniscience that I find unbelievable.
Until you know everything about reality, I suggest against ruling anything out.

Humility is always better than hubris.

When every mystery of the universe uncovered so far has been proven to have a scientific explanation, why then should I assume any remaining mysteries are not going to follow this pattern?

[Deleted]

Your o-so-human opinion...which is obviously predicated upon an omniscience that I find unbelievable.
Until you know everything about reality, I suggest against ruling anything out.

Humility is always better than hubris.

When has a single one been proven to be the supernatural? Of course, the possibility can't be denied out of principle, but in practice "magic" has never been the answer. It's highly unlikely it ever will.

[Revi]

It's a neat idea that's been around for a while, but I have trouble understanding how an element of randomness to the universe somehow translates to free will. If outcomes aren't deterministic, just highly probabilistic, that doesn't mean we have any more control of them. Zero agency is shifted to us, it just shifts a bit of the cause over to random processes.

What am I missing?

[Deleted]

Don't you find it fun when they do it though?


In a materialistic universe though, free will is absolutely the product of biology. Something something you develop consciousness, along with the ability to resist urges. Then because of evolution or the plasticity of the brain or something things go wrong (eg suicide) etc.

= = =.

No scientist worth the name would say such things as science studies reality, not philosophy.

So... what do you call that ability to resist urges or not? "Sometimes things go wrong", not sure where you are going with that. How do you classify how things went "wrong"? One can think life is so meaningless it's not worth living. Is this "wrong"? The answer depends from individual to individual. The "wrong" is subjective. You can say it's a mental illness, but then that would be a condition. Were they born with that? Did they make themselves ill? Is it really an illness then or a choice?
I get the urge to think that it is all just a balance of hormones. But i think the ability to make decisions beyond that and survival prove that we do have free will, or at least the ability to break from it's constraints, as whatever makes us make a decision varies from individual to individual. That in itself is what tells me we have free will.

[Nerovar]

Sounds a whole lot like grasping at straws.

[Nurvus]

I think all of this boils down to:
1 - Assuming true randomness isn't simply denial towards the existence of patterns we have yet to perceive/understand.
2 - Assuming the existence of true randomness somehow means we have free will... what?
It feels as though "scientists" are trying to explain reality through logic semantics:
"If True Randomness is the opposite of Predetermination, and Predetermination is the opposite of Free Will, then True Randomness must be Free Will!"

If anything, steps that take us closer to proving the existence of Free Will will probably be the same steps that take us closer to proving we exist beyond the physical realm.

[VanishingAct]

This type of stuff you can follow it a long the lines of whatever you want. You can claim that is the existence of god with that Langan's cosmic consciousness theory which goes a long the same lines.
Who knows what happens, the only thing I do know is that it won't pay my bills or feed my wife and kids.

[Steelcryo]

Thing is, what if the universe is predetermined and that light already knew when it set off that billions of years later that experiment would take place? If things are set from the beginning of the universe, would they need to be entangled to effect each other if they were following a set plan?

[Daethz]

Randomness is very confined, the universe has a ton of structure, although something as simple as the light from a star 5 billion lightyears away could effect/change a moment in your life leading to a cascade of changes, the theory of alternate universes would have far more dramatically changed timelines than movies on the subject portray.
Wind from a bullet in ww2 could shift ever so slightly, hit a different troop, leading to a president or inventor not being born, imagine if H.W Bush died in ww2.

All of that said, the only way I think free will couldn't exist is if we are semi-self-aware AI's in some super advanced aliens computer giving us the illusion of reality and choice.

[Najnaj]

You forgot to add Schrodinger's Cat, it is a must if you want to sound smart when posting pseudo intellectual nonsense.

[Forogil]

Wait, what now? Wikipedia has a fair sized page on the idea:

https://infogalactic.com/info/Free_will

Sure, there are competing definitions, but they're still, you know, definitions...

Contradictory definitions - many of which are incompatible with the physical laws, are not really definitions, even for people attempting to copy Wikipedia.

However, you missed the second part that humans cannot directly use the quantum randomness to directly make truly random choices in the macro world. That sort of falsifies the argument stating that "free will" is linked to quantum randomness.

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your second part is mixing up many different things in an unintelligible way. You'll have to be more specific. However if by "wanting to randomly go left" you mean going left randomly, with exactly 50% chances, then you don't know :


=> that people can't tap into it at all, sure maybe not in your example but many scientists are seriously considering the impact of quantum mechanics on consciousness

We know that, since experiments have shown that people are bad at making truly random choices, and generally create some discernable pattern.

And we also know that having the ability to randomly go left or right would in some cases be optimal to confuse predators.

Thus it is a falsified theory.

=> that, more importantly, having true randomness would give any advantage over perceived, fake randomness. As long as the predator can't tell which way you go, it does not matter if it's a true random event, just like computers don't use true random events but simulate them.

So many errors.

Quantum randomness would be true randomness, whereas humans attempt at randomness isn't even a good pseudo-random-number generator. Thus if we had access to the quantum randomness we wouldn't have to fake it so badly.
And that non-existent randomness is the thing people try to link to "free will".

The reason it isn't used more often in computers is twofold: it's expensive compared to good pseudo-random-number generators and not always optimal (e.g. in many monto-carlo simulations less randomness can be better).

However, in some cases people use true random generators in computers (at least I have heard of them since the 1980s, prior to that they had large tables of random numbers) - when it's superior and the additional cost is worth it.

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You forgot to add Schrodinger's Cat, it is a must if you want to sound smart when posting pseudo intellectual nonsense.

True, except that PETA says that we should now use Schrödinger's Carrot :-)

[EliWallach]

Like Susskind said in one of his interviews. Still waiting for that once in a century graduate student to show up who turns theoretical physics on its head and puts us back on the path to enlightenment. Probably won't answer the questions about free will but hopefully will get us out of the solar system.

[Teleros]

Seeing as how there's no such thing as the supernatural, we can rule that out.

That's besides the point. If there is anything supernatural, then by definition it is not the domain of science.

So... what do you call that ability to resist urges or not?

Eh, I'm a Christian so I've no problem chucking out a materialistic view of all this . I'm just trying to be fair to the materialist position.

"Sometimes things go wrong", not sure where you are going with that. How do you classify how things went "wrong"? One can think life is so meaningless it's not worth living. Is this "wrong"? The answer depends from individual to individual. The "wrong" is subjective. You can say it's a mental illness, but then that would be a condition.

Off-hand, the most objective / least subjective version in this case would be something like "wrong means not doing what the vast majority of humans do in that situation", because at least then you can say that choosing to, for sake of argument, commit suicide because you think life is meaningless etc etc etc is such a rare response to existence (doubly so given the obvious problems it imposes on your survival or reproductive success :P ) that it can be considered a wrong response. Obviously though there couldn't really be an objective standard.

Contradictory definitions - many of which are incompatible with the physical laws, are not really definitions, even for people attempting to copy Wikipedia.

You said there was no definition of "free will". There are in fact many, and whilst I'm happy to admit that some of those will be wrong, those definitions still exist.

Second, the fact that a definition is allegedly incompatible with physical laws is besides the point. First, whether or not you are an atheist has a rather enormous impact on this question. Second, in science fiction an FTL drive has a definition that very often is completely incompatible with physical laws, yet we make use of the concept all the time just fine.

However, you missed the second part that humans cannot directly use the quantum randomness to directly make truly random choices in the macro world. That sort of falsifies the argument stating that "free will" is linked to quantum randomness.

I've been saying that since I began posting in here :P .

However, in some cases people use true random generators in computers (at least I have heard of them since the 1980s, prior to that they had large tables of random numbers) - when it's superior and the additional cost is worth it.

RNG software isn't truly random. Plug in some numbers to a fixed formula and get a number out the other end. It's nothing more than rolling a many-sided die - if you know the initial conditions accurately enough you can predict the outcome with perfect certainty every single time.

[Veggie50]

They proved, or think they've proved, that there is true randomness and that leads them to believe in the possibility of free will.

False equivalency here. Just because there's true randomness somewhere on some level, does not mean our "will" isn't predetermined. To make that statement one would be required to show that elements of our thought process are subject to this "randomness".

[Ryme]

For a long time, scientists have said that everything is predetermined.

They haven't thought this for close to a century now.

[Luckx]

First sentence and i was already checked out. Science has nothing to do with free will, that's the domain of philosophy, and scientists most definitly don't say that.

Free will or not is not the product of biology. You have the ability to resist your urges. If you see a sexy woman that you really want to bang you don't jump her in a corner. If anything our choices are dictated by survival, but then again there's people who commit suicide. So, no. We definitly have free will, and it's built through our individual experiences.

Healthy people with normal working brain might have free will, but brain damaged and crazy people sometimes cant control their brains.

And healthy people can become brain damaged ones after incidents like car crashes where she/he was driving carefully but other driver was drunk.

[Deleted]

It's a neat idea that's been around for a while, but I have trouble understanding how an element of randomness to the universe somehow translates to free will. If outcomes aren't deterministic, just highly probabilistic, that doesn't mean we have any more control of them. Zero agency is shifted to us, it just shifts a bit of the cause over to random processes.

What am I missing?

Read my first posts, I try to explain it.

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I think all of this boils down to:
1 - Assuming true randomness isn't simply denial towards the existence of patterns we have yet to perceive/understand.
2 - Assuming the existence of true randomness somehow means we have free will... what?
It feels as though "scientists" are trying to explain reality through logic semantics:
"If True Randomness is the opposite of Predetermination, and Predetermination is the opposite of Free Will, then True Randomness must be Free Will!"

If anything, steps that take us closer to proving the existence of Free Will will probably be the same steps that take us closer to proving we exist beyond the physical realm.

Every person who wants to refute a definition of free will should begin by writing a definition of their own, as precise as possible, this way we are not speaking out of thin air...

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Contradictory definitions - many of which are incompatible with the physical laws, are not really definitions, even for people attempting to copy Wikipedia.

However, you missed the second part that humans cannot directly use the quantum randomness to directly make truly random choices in the macro world. That sort of falsifies the argument stating that "free will" is linked to quantum randomness.

- - - Updated - - -


We know that, since experiments have shown that people are bad at making truly random choices, and generally create some discernable pattern.

And we also know that having the ability to randomly go left or right would in some cases be optimal to confuse predators.

Thus it is a falsified theory.


So many errors.

Quantum randomness would be true randomness, whereas humans attempt at randomness isn't even a good pseudo-random-number generator. Thus if we had access to the quantum randomness we wouldn't have to fake it so badly.
And that non-existent randomness is the thing people try to link to "free will".

The reason it isn't used more often in computers is twofold: it's expensive compared to good pseudo-random-number generators and not always optimal (e.g. in many monto-carlo simulations less randomness can be better).

However, in some cases people use true random generators in computers (at least I have heard of them since the 1980s, prior to that they had large tables of random numbers) - when it's superior and the additional cost is worth it.

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True, except that PETA says that we should now use Schrödinger's Carrot :-)

You say there were many errors in my post, and then you don't try to refute anything I said. Yes, true randomness would be more random than when we "randomly" make a conscious choice, as I said. The thing is the predator trying to eat you does not have access to a supercomputer the size of our galaxy to analyze every parameter and guess which way you will chooseto run. So we don't need a part of our brain which gives us a true random number on demand, or to be more specific it is not worth the effort considering how unlikely ot is to randomly evolve such a feature.

People link true quantic randomness to free will regardless of wether we have access to it in our brains or not. The idea is that if true randomness exists somewhere in our universe, then free will is a valid concept, otherwise it does not exist as it isn't "free" of anything.

Yes, I know we can use true randomness if we really want to, but it's a question of costs and benefits. If fake randomness is good enough to fool our brains, and the brains of every living being, why invest heavily to have true randomness ? Shockingly, the same principle applies to evolution : costs and benefits. True randomness has no benefits and heavy evolutionnary costs, so it's no wonder we don't have a random number generator in our brains. QED.

That does not mean that there is no unconscious phenomenon that relies on quantic mechanics however, but that's highly speculative.

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False equivalency here. Just because there's true randomness somewhere on some level, does not mean our "will" isn't predetermined. To make that statement one would be required to show that elements of our thought process are subject to this "randomness".

Yes and no. It's not actually a false equivalency because your thought process doesn't happen in a vaccum, it is influenced by everything around you, and everything inside you, all made of matter that not only follow quantum mechanics, but also exist because of other entities which were also affected by quantum mechanics, etc etc up till the first instants of the universe. That means that even if your thought process does not use quantic randomness in any way, it is still subject to it one way or another. Your decisions would still be absolutely unpredictable even by a god with a computer the size of the universe. So your will is not predetermined.