According to Robert Sapolsky, human free will does not exist

[Jarhyn]

Although most folks tend to accept that proposition as true, it is possible that the proposition is false and that two objects (however small) can be in precisely the same place / location (including howsoever many dimensions may exist).

I would say it is in fact quite the contradiction to say that they can be so.

If you would like to demonstrate two objects being in the same place at the same time in the same way but also still two different objects rather than a distinctly new sort of third object, or rotated through new space, or any such notion...

Demonstrate it.

Just one, anywhere, where it must be so that the only possible explanation is this nonsensical contradiction, and maybe we can step past here.

Your persistent insistence upon demonstration is demonstrably limiting.

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Nor is it a self-contradiction to say that I suppose that a given object is both in a particular place / location (including howsoever many dimensions may exist) and not in that particular place / location (including howsoever many dimensions may exist)

Yes. It is.

Honestly, I think we're done now. You're at the point where you're pointedly "ducking out with the full abandonment of reason".

All of our notions in metaphysical discussions are based entirely on the notion that contradictions can't exist; that is the set of terms under which "possibility" as a notion is defined.

If we accept as possible that which is both A and ~A at the same time and place in the same way, that is a full abandonment of logic and reasoning and anything that could be considered valid metaphysics.

If that's how you want terminate thought, though, so be it..

"Pre-determined" is just saying "in the set of all sets that way and only that way in any place that could be considered similar".

It's a contradiction in premise, admittedly at this point.

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Ah, argument by muppet.

Seriously, demonstrate your invisible pink unicorn or whatever.

In fact the impacts to energy and rotation are quite exactly what we would expect from these other spaces where superposition is hypothesized on being "into". Where QM gets the many worlds interpretation is that there is a whole world where every "possible in terms of ???" Is expressed.

The whole quest of quantum mechanics is, in fact, to resolve or to understand why we can't resolve what determines which of those abstract possibilities such weird events cause.

Up in the Newtonian world, however, we can very clearly see that when you shove two masses together, you don't eliminate the volumes, all the way to molecules, which are surrounded by vast gulfs created by the exchange of forces through particles/waves, which as stated, really don't end up even "occupying different places in strange spaces" for very long.

I really really would appreciate you just taking my advice, and taking a physics class.

My point on the early portion of your visit here was to actively acknowledge a mechanism that decides such things with regularity in exactly the same level of "unpredictableness" as we observe in quantum mechanics to resolve qualities of those spaces.

IF you want trite bullshit, maybe I can quote "fools professing they are wise reveal their foolishness".

You are this thing. I have treated myself as a fool for thinking such as you and now I think such as I do now. I treat myself as a fool for thinking what I do now, in fact, and I look forward to when I discover the justification for that.

Nothing you have said impresses on me that you have tried to understand behavior in some fundamental way, and you are honestly trying to talk down with trite muppetry to someone who went to school, studied all manner of behavior and especially their own, about a core aspect of behavior: whether we can identify responsibility within it.

If it comes down to the fact that we can point to the edge of the universe in some way and say 'this happened because that happened to be shaped that way', this is deterministic; but the sorts of events that happen in our brain are specifically organized to resist statistical stuff like that, the same way a binary transistor switch resists all noise under a threshold of energy when voltage is over a threshold.

I mean fuck, are you suddenly a libertarian?

 

[Jarhyn]

Describe "concrete", because, by your presentation, your demand comes across as a non-necessary requirement. Then describe "relational" and "functional", and I might be able to render your remark communicative.

Take a fucking math class. These are basic terms. That is me being charitable, in the charity that you may actually learn something and quit bothering people with contradictory bullshit.

Your hollow you-too fallacies are also tired.

I will be as charitable to you as I was to myself when I thought as you do: take a class, and learn how doubt works.

Google is your friend here. In fact

https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=functional+vs+relational+math

*I guess it was hard. I had to add 'math' to get it to work.

 

[Michael S. Pearl]

Describe "concrete", because, by your presentation, your demand comes across as a non-necessary requirement. Then describe "relational" and "functional", and I might be able to render your remark communicative.

Take a fucking math class. These are basic terms.

You are a modal fallacy incarnate. Yes, they are basic terms, but, since they are not necessary terms, you were given the opportunity to express yourself differently and in a way which did not make it seem as if you were insisting that those terms were necessary which is to say to the exclusion of other possibilities - because that would be begging the question, given that you never established your manner of expression as one which was exclusively appropriate.

 

[Jarhyn]

Describe "concrete", because, by your presentation, your demand comes across as a non-necessary requirement. Then describe "relational" and "functional", and I might be able to render your remark communicative.

Take a fucking math class. These are basic terms.

You are a modal fallacy incarnate. Yes, they are basic terms, but, since they are not necessary terms, you were given the opportunity to express yourself differently and in a way which did not make it seem as if you were insisting that those terms were necessary which is to say to the exclusion of other possibilities - because that would be begging the question, given that you never established your manner of expression as one which was exclusively appropriate.

They are terms used specifically so that you can understand the metaphor and why deterministic causation is functional causation, namely that at no time is anything undecided.

Rejecting that is exactly libertarianism, which you accept is thrown out in the position of determinism.

I want you, very much, to demonstrate for physics this thing.

If you can demonstrate two things, inverse in some nature, at the same exact time and place in every way that can be accorded to any manner of context, you will win a Nobel prize.

Possibly all the Nobel Prizes.

In fact several discoveries on the way to that would also earn you such prizes.

Usually the people getting the prizes get them for discovering the inverse.

Go ahead. I'll wait.

 

[Michael S. Pearl]

deterministic causation is functional causation, namely that at no time is anything undecided.

I have no idea whether you are being metaphorical with that "undecided". Since minds decide, and since determinism has been a central topic, and since determinism has been described as a description rather than a function thus making it unnecessary to restrict determinism to causal determinism, the term "undecided" is to be disambiguated for the sake of broad(er/est) compatibility and more extensive or the most extensive possible consistency.

Instead of undecided, there are alternatives such as undetermined, not determined, etc., but determined might likewise suggest an active agency upon which the determinism description does not actually have to rely. Terms such as fixed and settled have been employed previously, and, of these two possibilities, settled is the one which at least at first seems least tied to actual non-metaphorical agency. So, for the time being, "at no time is anything undecided" is being regarded as "at no time is anything unsettled".

An unsettled condition (or situation or context) is one which can effect or give way to another condition, but an unsettled condition would be more completely or thoroughly unsettled were it also unsettled with regards to exactly what condition is to be given way to or with regards to what condition becomes actual. This more thorough unsettledness presents as alternatives - as possibilities - regarding what condition is to be given way to or what condition is to be actual. This unsettledness need not present as unlimited possibilities, and this is what I previously described in terms of the indeterminateness which at least some persons think they perceive on occasion within an otherwise determinate context.

that is exactly libertarianism, which you accept is thrown out in the position of determinism.

If determinism necessarily denies (meaning: if all versions of determinism deny) that there is the aforementioned unsettledness (and, for reasons explicated previously, the discussion context now regards the macrophysical level at which humans function when they think they choose/decide/select/settle), then determinism denies that there are alternatives (hence possibilities) regarding what condition is to be given way to or what condition is to become actual subsequent to a sequentially prior condition.

You believe that there are those very possibilities which you say are denied by determinism.

I want you, very much, to demonstrate for physics this thing.

If you can demonstrate two things, inverse in some nature, at the same exact time and place in every way that can be accorded to any manner of context

Physics is not (at least currently) sufficient to establish that the unsettledness, the possibilities perceived by humans at the macrophysical level are definitely, assuredly non-actual and, as a consequence, illusory. Unlike physics, scientistic physicalism holds that the possibilities perceived by humans at the macrophysical level are definitely, assuredly non-actual and illusory.

My focus has been - and remains - on the experience of human being.

Even so, with regards to the matter of "the same exact time and place" and "context", I previously warned against identifying those descriptive terms with dimensionless points. That is because, logically, it is not necessary to regard time and place in terms of dimensionless points. Time can sensibly be considered in terms of the extension commonly called duration; likewise, place can be extended as space, for instance. Indeed, that is what at least some humans do when they regard time and place; this is the time and place of human experience. These extensions can be and tend to be indefinite, and this means that "context" is in itself an indefinite term. This is why it can be perfectly sensible - and not a contradiction - to describe alternatives/possibilities as present within a particular (even if indefinite) context, within a particular (even if indefinitely extended) spacetime.

Is it necessary that you speak in terms of indefinitely extended spacetime contexts? Of course not, but you are still wrong to claim that there has been a contradiction.

 

[Jarhyn]

Interestingly, the few people who have proposed the inverse of one-place-one-thing have proposed some more libertarian interpretation, to resolve the decision of which they lean on probabilistics to answer. Still, this pushes the objects inevitably out of whatever space they were in into some more exotic direction in space, in any theory with explanatory power, and generally the properties of that extension of space can be modeled in some way.

But again, this is always proposed in an attempt to resolve the one-place-one-thing problem to the best of abilities to do so.

It doesn't matter insofar as from our perspective, it's just as much a valid assumption that the 'tiles at the edge' are being placed willy-nilly however they'll fit, to go to the metaphor; the math works out the same either way. In fact many pages ago it was addressed that probabilistic and deterministic systems can be represented either way, when the information "coming in from that edge" is not correlated to what has been seen before.

Some pages before that, perhaps in a different interminable thread years earlier, I proposed instead modeling it like an infinite field of "dice towers" while admitting I didn't know how they would be loaded, as a model for modeling such "assembled willy-nilly" systems repeatable as deterministic ones.

Later, I considered that we can use encryption keys and encryption algorithms to populate a finite version, and a placement regime on any aperiodic tile field to do it in an infinite way.

That's why I discussed those things in particular: to resolve the one-place-one-thing thing at a quantum level.

In large scale physics, though, we see fairly clear conservation of mass and energy: if you put two things in the same place, it's all that same stuff just arranged differently in space.

We ascertained that this was true on small scales between matter and energy and discovered nuclear fission and fusion.

Hell, when you pick up paperweight in one hand and a desk toy in the other, and move to intersect them, they collide with one another because whatever spatial structure that holds electrons there just won't allow electron fields to occupy certain spaces, and if you try, you will crush the two into paste and make some suspension, solution, or paste of the same mass, same number of atoms, and all those atoms all smashed around and maybe a tiny bit extra for all the force you used to mush them.

And to say otherwise IS to take a libertarian position, and many people will accommodate that with "sufficient determinism" but quite pointedly... Its also not a deterministic model, and it doesn't broadly describe anything of how or why our thoughts are as they are; it presents a sort of exotic noise?

But we are beings of signals, and so then the discussion would move to "sufficient determinism", and compatibilism would be totally vindicated from hard determinism because at that point we would have already stepped away from fatalism.

We get a lot of folks who believe a lot of things through here.

I have no idea whether you are being metaphorical with that "undecided"

So, you take the sum total of ways that the sum total of parts of a system CAN end up being determined (as a finite patch of some system with respect to all the surrounding patch structures can be ordered), and then present some set of axioms. With those axioms, do you have information to reach a next state, of the states that you know are expressed in the set of the observed range? If the answer is NO, it is "undecidable" with the information you have.

In computation this is expressed as "an output for all inputs yields a correct yes or no answer".

When options for answers become less binary the math gets weirder, but the same kinds of questions still pop up, specifically if the system yields just one answer on the variables.

This is why I bring up functional vs relational math and these ideas specifically about where information can come from in a deterministic system that contains apparent "randomness" of the "could just as easily be placed willy-nilly right as we observe them" sort that results from the "undecidable" problem of "where you are in the system from the perspective of only having local observation to work with".

You understanding the language that I use is important because a LOT of formal concepts of VERY abstract nature have been proven using that language and it's strict analogues in other professional disciplines.

By learning even ONE such strict logical language, I think most, or hopefully at least "many" people could understand these concepts... But that's the extent of the charity I offer here, because the folks arguing for spatial contradiction are "not-even-wrong" at this point.

I mean shit, spatial contradiction would be.. well, libertarian.

 

[DBT]

a deterministic system is a system in which no randomness is involved in the development of future states of the system

Ah yes, off the cuff definitions given 7 years ago: the standard itself of accurate discussion.

What was given seven years ago or seven days ago doesn't alter how determinism is defined.

It's a standard definition.

You can't just cook up any old terms because you don't like how determinism is defined, or what the implications are.

That said, you don't understand "randomness" so you don't understand what that definition even means in the first place.

Crock, I know exactly what randomness means. And randomness is not a part of a deterministic system.

If you insist that determinism includes random events, you don't understand determinism.

Worse, you don't understand that randomness doesn't help you to argue for free will.

Decision making is not random. It is a process, where random events disrupt, not aid decision making.

Do you not know how insulation works? The thing that keeps the charge in the wire independent of charges and ions in the air such that circuits do not close except on the pathway of the wire itself?

Hilarious. Do you know how a brain processes information in order to respond to the objects and events of the world?

A hint; it is not the work of 'independent' electrical activity within a system that has, by definition, no components that are outside of or independent of the system itself.

Your example has no relevance to the issue of free will.

You are scraping the bottom of an empty barrel.

Field isolation creates relative independence, which is yet again why I BEG you to get some sort of education in systems theory, and to actually debug a deterministic system some time to understand that determinism doesn't imply choices do not happen.

Only fatalism implies that by stealing all choice and attributing it to a nonsensical God.

Which shows that you don't understand how determinism is defined or the implications of it.

What you do have is an incoherent mash up of incompatible principles.

 

[DBT]

For instance, Pood has endorsed constant conjunction and adequate determinism, which do not permit alternate choice or action, yet argues for free choice.

Yet I have pointed out that you have never yet defended the claim that determinism does “not permit alternate choice or action,” whereas I have pointed out that because determinism is a mindless descriptive process, it is not the sort of thing that can permit, fail to permit, or coerce, anything.

That determinism does not permit alternate actions is inherent.

determinism, in philosophy and science, the thesis that all events in the universe, including human decisions and actions, are causally inevitable. Determinism entails that, in a situation in which a person makes a certain decision or performs a certain action, it is impossible that he or she could have made any other decision or performed any other action. In other words, it is never true that people could have decided or acted otherwise than they actually did.''

I await your answer to my longstanding request to explain how hard determinism paints pictures, writes novels, composes symphonies, and designs buildings.

The answer has been given multiple times;

Conditions on earth have evolved, microbes to multicellular organisms, to the point where creatures capable of writing, painting, landing spacecraft on other planets, etcetera, have evolved.

Our abilities were not freely willed, we played no part in deciding what we would become or be capable of, but how events unfold as the system evolves from past to present state, a species capable of art, science, books, music, where the present conditions, the current state of the world in turn determines future states of the system.

 

[Jarhyn]

It's a standard definition.

Ah yes the standard of all good arguments: argument from tradition.

That determinism does not permit alternate actions is inherent

And argument from necessity...

Our abilities were not freely willed, we played no part in deciding what we would become or be capable of

Yes they were, in part, by people along that timeline.

People said "I want smart kids" so they went out and fucked smarter people.

In fact, I've met people exactly with those goals as stated before.

In fact, we even have this whole big thing called "artificial selection" that humans are very well known for.

Jesus fuck, it would be nice if your religious bullshit wasn't so transparently obvious.