Compatibilism: What's that About?

[Marvin Edwards]

Free will is an illusion based on an incomplete understanding of the underlying deterministic processes. Compatibilism ignores this and attempts to define free will into existence through semantics.

I only got this far in the thread before I realized it had been locked, because I tried to respond and couldn't. The staff unlocked it. Thanks guys.

Full disclosure: I'm not well versed in philosophy.

I never understood "compatibilism". But reading this, it sounds like me. I see "free will" as an illusion, created by our inability to recognize our own motivations. We humans aren't really all that smart or perceptive. Illusions are an extremely important part of the human experience. That's just how we are.

From horizons to literature to randomness to ideologies to mathematics, the human experience is dominated by abstractions. Things that have no objective existence. But we don't define them into existence.

I see free will the same way. It is abstract, but very real.

What I find aggravatingly dishonest is theists insisting that free will has objective existence. Because otherwise their omnimax benevolent God becomes utterly incoherent and internally inconsistent. That's the whole point to much of Genesis. Claiming that God is Almighty. The reason He appears to be a bumbling sky king, with superpowers, is because we humans have free will and are therefore responsible for all the suffering.

Eve tied God's Hands.

Tom

When I first ran into the determinism "versus" free will paradox, I don't think the word "compatibilism" was in use. I was a teenager in the public library who had just read something by Spinoza that suggested free will did not exist due to every event being reliably caused by prior events. This bothered me, so I tried to come up with someway to escape inevitability. I decided this would be easy to do. The next time I had a choice between any two things, say A and B, and I found myself leaning heavily toward A, I would simply choose B instead. So easy. But then it occurred to me that my desire to thwart inevitability had just made B the inevitable choice. So, to escape inevitability, I had to choose A.

Hmm. It was an infinite loop. No matter what I chose, there would always be a reason that caused my choice to be inevitable! That's when it dawned on me. The only reason for my choice changes was to escape inevitability. But the only person in the room was me. I had imagined inevitability as something that I had to escape. But inevitability wasn't there. Only I was. And it occurred to me that, if inevitability actually were such an entity, it would be sitting in the corner laughing at me, for having caused me such distress just by thinking about it.

Once I realized that what I would inevitably do was exactly identical to me just being me, doing whatever I chose to do, inevitability ceased to be a problem. It was not a real constraint. It was precisely what I would have done anyway.

So, from my perspective, causal necessity is not a threat to free will. Free will is nothing more or less than what we choose to do, while free of coercion and other forms of undue influence. Free will was never free from reliable causation. And it needn't be, because reliable cause and effect is not a meaningful or relevant constraint.

The initial illusion, is that reliable cause and effect (causal necessity) is some kind of causal agent exercising control over us (hard determinism). That illusion creates the second illusion, that we must be free of reliable cause and effect in order to have free will (libertarian free will). Both are illusions.

As you point out, it is a matter of abstractions. Causal necessity is an abstraction that consolidates all of the simple cause and effect events into one notion.

But reliable cause and effect is instantiated daily, as we reliably cause events, like fixing breakfast, driving to work, etc. And free will is instantiated daily as people decide for themselves what they will do, while free of coercion and undue influence.

As to God's problem, if an entity is omniscient and omnipotent, then it is also omni-responsible. Free will provides no "get out of jail free" card for God.

Riiight. Fortunately another observation works better. There is no God!

And if there were, any entity whose behavior is governed by their own goals and reasons would exhibit behavior that is reliably caused, i.e., deterministic behavior. And since free will is deterministic, he would qualify as having free will as well. His choices would be both reliably caused and reliably caused by himself. You know, exactly the same as our own free will. (Which makes sense, because we created him in our own image).

 

[fromderinside]

We see problems differently. I am not going to choose just among the options available to me while you obviously are doing so.

That said, our objective methodology has produced impressive results and we are learning more all the time. What we 'know' serves very well as a stand-in for material reality. It is usable for most material endeavors. Our telescope/microscope of understanding is useful in choosing probable outcomes of more than we can test, but it is nowhere near capable of deriving all.

Let's explore the metaphysics here using an example.

I have a function written down. It says y=x^2

I also have a line drawn out on a piece of paper.

I cannot know all values this paper describes. You could not fit the description of even something so simple as an entire parabola in the entirety of every particle in the observable universe, or even in the entire interactive universe WRT your reference frame. All that is "big" but infinity is still "bigger".

You cannot, in this universe, "know" all of Y=X^2.

However you can understand it: I can describe just for the asking what any given Y value is for any given X. I could operate on Y=X^2 and get a description of all functions that intersect through this set. I can understand that set, too.

I just can't know every point.

I can do the same thing with a function that instead of describing an infinite universe of 'parabola' defines instead 'universe like ours', and the nice thing about a 'universe like ours' is that they are robust enough to contain a description of their own architecture, a macroscale object that behaves faithfully as it's microscale behaves.

In many ways there are things also that can be understood but not predicted: we can understand the series of events that happens from (particle configuration A) that is unstable and capable of forming one of (set of outcomes from destabilization event). We can understand that this will resolve in a random selection from an infinite set. We can understand 'random' too, and the character of the infinite* set. We can't "know" what will happen but that is not a lack of understanding, but in many ways, an attainment of it.

*Possibly finite? I wonder at times if there is a quantization happening with the interaction wave that behaves more like a graph connection or association than a macroscale "impact"

I'll make one more attempt to communicate.

At the time of the renaissance, Scholars were counting angels on the heads of pins.

Archimedes' didn't get through around 200 BC when he noted mass displaces liquids with "Eureka", Western white man ignored the material demonstration and continued counting angels on pinheads. It took Galileo with a telescope found satellites orbiting around Jupiter tried to publish those material findings in Religious Press to kick start material analysis worked quite well explaining physical behavior while Rational analysis just generated interesting truisms and fallacies. Yeah, it didn't hurt that the printing press was there to reproduce the discussions.

https://www.bnl.gov/newsroom/news.php?a=119023 Collisions of Light Produce Matter/Antimatter from Pure Energy

"The primary finding is that pairs of electrons and positrons—particles of matter and antimatter—can be created directly by colliding very energetic photons, which are quantum “packets” of light. This conversion of energetic light into matter is a direct consequence of Einstein’s famous E=mc2 equation, which states that energy and matter (or mass) are interchangeable. Nuclear reactions in the sun and at nuclear power plants regularly convert matter into energy. Now scientists have converted light energy directly into matter in a single step."

The God particle was discovered when the Hadron collider accelerated protons to 99.9999991% of the speed of light, or three meters per second less than light speed. Accomplishing that acceleration looks to require about 13 teraelectronvolts.

Obviously, exponentially higher energies of accelerating force may produce theory-changing results. That is why I look to getting a bit closer to the energies at the big bang which is theorized to be a lot higher than those possible with Hadron Collider before I'm ready to say "we know it."

We will come up with a few new wrinkles to produce similar effects.

I know you think its strange but you know it's coming.

The Next Particle Collider Will Be Three Times Bigger Than the LHCIt will also be seven times more powerful https://futurism.com/the-next-particle-collider-will-be-three-times-bigger-than-the-lhc​

 

[Jarhyn]

We see problems differently. I am not going to choose just among the options available to me while you obviously are doing so.

That said, our objective methodology has produced impressive results and we are learning more all the time. What we 'know' serves very well as a stand-in for material reality. It is usable for most material endeavors. Our telescope/microscope of understanding is useful in choosing probable outcomes of more than we can test, but it is nowhere near capable of deriving all.

Let's explore the metaphysics here using an example.

I have a function written down. It says y=x^2

I also have a line drawn out on a piece of paper.

I cannot know all values this paper describes. You could not fit the description of even something so simple as an entire parabola in the entirety of every particle in the observable universe, or even in the entire interactive universe WRT your reference frame. All that is "big" but infinity is still "bigger".

You cannot, in this universe, "know" all of Y=X^2.

However you can understand it: I can describe just for the asking what any given Y value is for any given X. I could operate on Y=X^2 and get a description of all functions that intersect through this set. I can understand that set, too.

I just can't know every point.

I can do the same thing with a function that instead of describing an infinite universe of 'parabola' defines instead 'universe like ours', and the nice thing about a 'universe like ours' is that they are robust enough to contain a description of their own architecture, a macroscale object that behaves faithfully as it's microscale behaves.

In many ways there are things also that can be understood but not predicted: we can understand the series of events that happens from (particle configuration A) that is unstable and capable of forming one of (set of outcomes from destabilization event). We can understand that this will resolve in a random selection from an infinite set. We can understand 'random' too, and the character of the infinite* set. We can't "know" what will happen but that is not a lack of understanding, but in many ways, an attainment of it.

*Possibly finite? I wonder at times if there is a quantization happening with the interaction wave that behaves more like a graph connection or association than a macroscale "impact"

I'll make one more attempt to communicate.

At the time of the renaissance, Scholars were counting angels on the heads of pins.

Archimedes' didn't get through around 200 BC when he noted mass displaces liquids with "Eureka", Western white man ignored the material demonstration and continued counting angels on pinheads. It took Galileo with a telescope found satellites orbiting around Jupiter tried to publish those material findings in Religious Press to kick start material analysis worked quite well explaining physical behavior while Rational analysis just generated interesting truisms and fallacies. Yeah, it didn't hurt that the printing press was there to reproduce the discussions.

https://www.bnl.gov/newsroom/news.php?a=119023 Collisions of Light Produce Matter/Antimatter from Pure Energy

"The primary finding is that pairs of electrons and positrons—particles of matter and antimatter—can be created directly by colliding very energetic photons, which are quantum “packets” of light. This conversion of energetic light into matter is a direct consequence of Einstein’s famous E=mc2 equation, which states that energy and matter (or mass) are interchangeable. Nuclear reactions in the sun and at nuclear power plants regularly convert matter into energy. Now scientists have converted light energy directly into matter in a single step."

The God particle was discovered when the Hadron collider accelerated protons to 99.9999991% of the speed of light, or three meters per second less than light speed. Accomplishing that acceleration looks to require about 13 teraelectronvolts.

Obviously, exponentially higher energies of accelerating force may produce theory-changing results. That is why I look to getting a bit closer to the energies at the big bang which is theorized to be a lot higher than those possible with Hadron Collider before I'm ready to say "we know it."

We will come up with a few new wrinkles to produce similar effects.

I know you think its strange but you know it's coming.

The Next Particle Collider Will Be Three Times Bigger Than the LHCIt will also be seven times more powerful https://futurism.com/the-next-particle-collider-will-be-three-times-bigger-than-the-lhc​

Your patronizing bullshit aside, you're still failing, not to communicate but to understand.

I am not saying that we know the exact architecture yet that describes and "understands" all that we see.

You are arguing "we do not know what the universe behaves like in some edge cases" and then pushing that argument into an implication that the universe cannot possibly contain a complete understanding of itself.

I can create a universe of quanta that contains a description of its own architecture, and which even executes exactly the host OS in a client. I can even make a universe which implements the behavior of instructions not directly present on the metal.

Honestly, it's not dissimilar from a tarball I saw the other day that decompresses to itself. Yes, you heard that right. The fact that these things can and do exist implies the universe can host an understanding of itself.

 

[fromderinside]

We see problems differently. I am not going to choose just among the options available to me while you obviously are doing so.

That said, our objective methodology has produced impressive results and we are learning more all the time. What we 'know' serves very well as a stand-in for material reality. It is usable for most material endeavors. Our telescope/microscope of understanding is useful in choosing probable outcomes of more than we can test, but it is nowhere near capable of deriving all.

Let's explore the metaphysics here using an example.

I have a function written down. It says y=x^2

I also have a line drawn out on a piece of paper.

I cannot know all values this paper describes. You could not fit the description of even something so simple as an entire parabola in the entirety of every particle in the observable universe, or even in the entire interactive universe WRT your reference frame. All that is "big" but infinity is still "bigger".

You cannot, in this universe, "know" all of Y=X^2.

However you can understand it: I can describe just for the asking what any given Y value is for any given X. I could operate on Y=X^2 and get a description of all functions that intersect through this set. I can understand that set, too.

I just can't know every point.

I can do the same thing with a function that instead of describing an infinite universe of 'parabola' defines instead 'universe like ours', and the nice thing about a 'universe like ours' is that they are robust enough to contain a description of their own architecture, a macroscale object that behaves faithfully as it's microscale behaves.

In many ways there are things also that can be understood but not predicted: we can understand the series of events that happens from (particle configuration A) that is unstable and capable of forming one of (set of outcomes from destabilization event). We can understand that this will resolve in a random selection from an infinite set. We can understand 'random' too, and the character of the infinite* set. We can't "know" what will happen but that is not a lack of understanding, but in many ways, an attainment of it.

*Possibly finite? I wonder at times if there is a quantization happening with the interaction wave that behaves more like a graph connection or association than a macroscale "impact"

I'll make one more attempt to communicate.

At the time of the renaissance, Scholars were counting angels on the heads of pins.

Archimedes' didn't get through around 200 BC when he noted mass displaces liquids with "Eureka", Western white man ignored the material demonstration and continued counting angels on pinheads. It took Galileo with a telescope found satellites orbiting around Jupiter tried to publish those material findings in Religious Press to kick start material analysis worked quite well explaining physical behavior while Rational analysis just generated interesting truisms and fallacies. Yeah, it didn't hurt that the printing press was there to reproduce the discussions.

https://www.bnl.gov/newsroom/news.php?a=119023 Collisions of Light Produce Matter/Antimatter from Pure Energy

"The primary finding is that pairs of electrons and positrons—particles of matter and antimatter—can be created directly by colliding very energetic photons, which are quantum “packets” of light. This conversion of energetic light into matter is a direct consequence of Einstein’s famous E=mc2 equation, which states that energy and matter (or mass) are interchangeable. Nuclear reactions in the sun and at nuclear power plants regularly convert matter into energy. Now scientists have converted light energy directly into matter in a single step."

The God particle was discovered when the Hadron collider accelerated protons to 99.9999991% of the speed of light, or three meters per second less than light speed. Accomplishing that acceleration looks to require about 13 teraelectronvolts.

Obviously, exponentially higher energies of accelerating force may produce theory-changing results. That is why I look to getting a bit closer to the energies at the big bang which is theorized to be a lot higher than those possible with Hadron Collider before I'm ready to say "we know it."

We will come up with a few new wrinkles to produce similar effects.

I know you think its strange but you know it's coming.

The Next Particle Collider Will Be Three Times Bigger Than the LHCIt will also be seven times more powerful https://futurism.com/the-next-particle-collider-will-be-three-times-bigger-than-the-lhc​

Your patronizing bullshit aside, you're still failing, not to communicate but to understand.

I am not saying that we know the exact architecture yet that describes and "understands" all that we see.

You are arguing "we do not know what the universe behaves like in some edge cases" and then pushing that argument into an implication that the universe cannot possibly contain a complete understanding of itself.

I can create a universe of quanta that contains a description of its own architecture, and which even executes exactly the host OS in a client. I can even make a universe which implements the behavior of instructions not directly present on the metal.

Honestly, it's not dissimilar from a tarball I saw the other day that decompresses to itself. Yes, you heard that right. The fact that these things can and do exist implies the universe can host an understanding of itself.

We're cascading back to a world of belief controlled by impulse and mood rather than toward a world of material knowledge subject to what we know about it. If a person uses free will which he hasn't or understands which he doesn't he ultimately exists within the narrow range of strongly held beliefs of his own ability to understand and work. You create a digital universe that is self-generated therefore it works from self to realization rather than from material necessity to material execution.

How then can you claim you understand? You only do what you believe based on those beliefs rather than do what is demanded of you by circumstances around you.

 

[DBT]

The external world is the 'god' that acts upon the brain. The external world is the source of information that a brain responds to. Responding, not according to its will, but its unchosen neural architecture and information processing activity.

 

[DBT]

Necessitated actions - being determined - are by definition are neither chosen, negotiable or alterable, events that proceed or unfold deterministically according to antecedent events and the laws of nature. Necessitated actions are not freely willed actions.

If it is causally determined that I must make a choice for myself, then I have no choice but to choose for myself what I will do. That is free will.
If it is causally determined that a guy with a gun forces me to do what he chooses. Then my will is subject to his, and is not free.

As always, causal necessity itself, makes no difference. It is a background constant, always present on both sides of every equation, and can be subtracted from both sides without affecting the result. For example, here are the same two statements, minus the unnecessary qualifier:

If I must make a choice for myself, then I have no choice but to choose for myself what I will do. That is free will.
If a guy with a gun forces me to do what he chooses. Then my will is subject to his, and is not free.

That is information processing. The state of the brain is the state of you. The brain acts according to architecture, memory and inputs. Inputs determine how the brain responds in terms of drives, desires, thoughts and actions. Which is not freely willed, or even willed at all.

Will is present, but not free will. The loss of memory function alone brings it undone.

Again, free will is a freely chosen will. The freedom is in the choosing. The issue is who or what is actually doing the choosing.

Neural network response to stimuli is the decision maker. The action being 'chosen' being an inevitable action based on the state of the system in that moment in time. Not really a decision in the true sense because determinism doesn't allow an alternative choice.

The action that taken is the only possible action. Nothing else is possible. Outcomes are determined by how events interact and unfold.

Nobody can take a different option.

Which is, as pointed out, why freedom is incompatible with determinism.

1. You do what you do, in any given situation, because of the way you are.
2. In order to be ultimately responsible for what you do, you have to be ultimately responsible for the way you are—at least in certain crucial mental aspects.
3. But you cannot be ultimately responsible for the way you are in any respect at all.
4. So you can’t be ultimately responsible for what you do. - Galen Strawson.

You seem to keep imagining that free will has to do with some kind of free floating will that is outside of the string of causation. Is that what you think free will is? Do you have any evidence to support that notion?

If not, then it would seem insincere to insist that free will be something that you believe cannot exist. That would be the ultimate straw man argument.

Einstein fell into the same trap. He said:

"In a sense, we can hold no one responsible. I am a determinist. As such, I do not believe in free will. ... Practically, I am, nevertheless, compelled to act as if freedom of the will existed. If I wish to live in a civilized community, I must act as if man is a responsible being."

Page 114 of "The Saturday Evening Post" article "What Life Means to Einstein" "An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck" (Oct 26, 1929)

Note that his position is incoherent, because he asserts that he does not believe in free will or responsibility, and yet he must act as if he does.

Acting is unavoidable. We have to act. How we act is determined by the information we have. The information we have is acquired by the brain (acting upon the brain) and presented in conscious form and action.

We thus know what effects the behaviour of others, the threat of punishment deters many (but not all), from behaving badly, therefore we have rules and regulations with penalties attached. Information acts upon the brain and modifies behaviour, enables skills and insights that would not be otherwise possible. Free will, which is just an idea, plays no part.

''Behavior modification is the process of changing patterns of human behavior over the long term using various motivational techniques, mainly consequences (negative reinforcement) and rewards (positive reinforcement). The ultimate goal is to swap objectionable, problematic, or disagreeable behaviors with more positive, desirable behaviors.''


Interaction;
''To successfully interact with objects in the environment, sensory evidence must be continuously acquired, interpreted, and used to guide appropriate motor responses. For example, when driving, a red light should motivate a motor command to depress the brake pedal. Single-unit recording studies have established that simple sensorimotor transformations are mediated by the same neurons that ultimately guide the behavioral response. However, it is also possible that these sensorimotor regions are the recipients of a modality-independent decision signal that is computed elsewhere.''

Consciousness, determined by inputs and neural architecture, has no special privileges within a determined system. Free will plays no part in information processing, response, behaviour modification, intelligence or learning.

An intelligent system is not necessarily a 'free will' system. The brain is an intelligent parallel processor.

 

[The AntiChris]

1. You do what you do, in any given situation, because of the way you are.
2. In order to be ultimately responsible for what you do, you have to be ultimately responsible for the way you are—at least in certain crucial mental aspects.
3. But you cannot be ultimately responsible for the way you are in any respect at all.
4. So you can’t be ultimately responsible for what you do. - Galen Strawson.

Strawson is talking about something he calls "ultimate" responsibility. Nobody on this thread has been arguing for ultimate responsibility - it's a nonsensical concept.

Strawson acknowledges that although ultimate responsibility cannot exist he has no problem with normal, everyday moral responsibility:

I just want to stress the word “ultimate” before “moral responsibility.” Because there’s a clear, weaker, everyday sense of “morally responsible” in which you and I and millions of other people are thoroughly morally responsible people.

 

[Jarhyn]

We see problems differently. I am not going to choose just among the options available to me while you obviously are doing so.

That said, our objective methodology has produced impressive results and we are learning more all the time. What we 'know' serves very well as a stand-in for material reality. It is usable for most material endeavors. Our telescope/microscope of understanding is useful in choosing probable outcomes of more than we can test, but it is nowhere near capable of deriving all.

Let's explore the metaphysics here using an example.

I have a function written down. It says y=x^2

I also have a line drawn out on a piece of paper.

I cannot know all values this paper describes. You could not fit the description of even something so simple as an entire parabola in the entirety of every particle in the observable universe, or even in the entire interactive universe WRT your reference frame. All that is "big" but infinity is still "bigger".

You cannot, in this universe, "know" all of Y=X^2.

However you can understand it: I can describe just for the asking what any given Y value is for any given X. I could operate on Y=X^2 and get a description of all functions that intersect through this set. I can understand that set, too.

I just can't know every point.

I can do the same thing with a function that instead of describing an infinite universe of 'parabola' defines instead 'universe like ours', and the nice thing about a 'universe like ours' is that they are robust enough to contain a description of their own architecture, a macroscale object that behaves faithfully as it's microscale behaves.

In many ways there are things also that can be understood but not predicted: we can understand the series of events that happens from (particle configuration A) that is unstable and capable of forming one of (set of outcomes from destabilization event). We can understand that this will resolve in a random selection from an infinite set. We can understand 'random' too, and the character of the infinite* set. We can't "know" what will happen but that is not a lack of understanding, but in many ways, an attainment of it.

*Possibly finite? I wonder at times if there is a quantization happening with the interaction wave that behaves more like a graph connection or association than a macroscale "impact"

I'll make one more attempt to communicate.

At the time of the renaissance, Scholars were counting angels on the heads of pins.

Archimedes' didn't get through around 200 BC when he noted mass displaces liquids with "Eureka", Western white man ignored the material demonstration and continued counting angels on pinheads. It took Galileo with a telescope found satellites orbiting around Jupiter tried to publish those material findings in Religious Press to kick start material analysis worked quite well explaining physical behavior while Rational analysis just generated interesting truisms and fallacies. Yeah, it didn't hurt that the printing press was there to reproduce the discussions.

https://www.bnl.gov/newsroom/news.php?a=119023 Collisions of Light Produce Matter/Antimatter from Pure Energy

"The primary finding is that pairs of electrons and positrons—particles of matter and antimatter—can be created directly by colliding very energetic photons, which are quantum “packets” of light. This conversion of energetic light into matter is a direct consequence of Einstein’s famous E=mc2 equation, which states that energy and matter (or mass) are interchangeable. Nuclear reactions in the sun and at nuclear power plants regularly convert matter into energy. Now scientists have converted light energy directly into matter in a single step."

The God particle was discovered when the Hadron collider accelerated protons to 99.9999991% of the speed of light, or three meters per second less than light speed. Accomplishing that acceleration looks to require about 13 teraelectronvolts.

Obviously, exponentially higher energies of accelerating force may produce theory-changing results. That is why I look to getting a bit closer to the energies at the big bang which is theorized to be a lot higher than those possible with Hadron Collider before I'm ready to say "we know it."

We will come up with a few new wrinkles to produce similar effects.

I know you think its strange but you know it's coming.

The Next Particle Collider Will Be Three Times Bigger Than the LHCIt will also be seven times more powerful https://futurism.com/the-next-particle-collider-will-be-three-times-bigger-than-the-lhc​

Your patronizing bullshit aside, you're still failing, not to communicate but to understand.

I am not saying that we know the exact architecture yet that describes and "understands" all that we see.

You are arguing "we do not know what the universe behaves like in some edge cases" and then pushing that argument into an implication that the universe cannot possibly contain a complete understanding of itself.

I can create a universe of quanta that contains a description of its own architecture, and which even executes exactly the host OS in a client. I can even make a universe which implements the behavior of instructions not directly present on the metal.

Honestly, it's not dissimilar from a tarball I saw the other day that decompresses to itself. Yes, you heard that right. The fact that these things can and do exist implies the universe can host an understanding of itself.

We're cascading back to a world of belief controlled by impulse and mood rather than toward a world of material knowledge subject to what we know about it. If a person uses free will which he hasn't or understands which he doesn't he ultimately exists within the narrow range of strongly held beliefs of his own ability to understand and work. You create a digital universe that is self-generated therefore it works from self to realization rather than from material necessity to material execution.

How then can you claim you understand? You only do what you believe based on those beliefs rather than do what is demanded of you by circumstances around you.

No, we aren't. We are exploring "mathematical possibilities" rather than "disproved and this definitely false bullshit".

I have disproved you through example: universes, especially ones with fixed quanta that can in macroscale be mutated to reliably mirror the statistical realities of their resolution, are self-understandable. As to whether they will ever be self-understood is a different matter.

You have three times made an argument from incredulity.

How have we been posting here and you have not in fact once recalled something I have said an obnoxious number of times:

Trust But Verify

This is what it means to doubt.

I have verified that a universe of rearrangeable stuff capable of arbitrary expression of metaphysics may be capable of describing itself in abstract, as to the way that stuff may be rearranged.

As we have seen, we are capable of doing that thing.

You understand completely when what you trust continues to fail to be disproven despite effort, hopefully well directed at any invention of fancy that people place a God into.

Just because you cannot say certainly or honestly from inside "I am right *", you can definitely actually BE right.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

Neural network response to stimuli is the decision maker. The action being 'chosen' being an inevitable action based on the state of the system in that moment in time.

"A decision in the true sense" is "an inevitable action based on the state of the system in that moment in time".

Not really a decision in the true sense because determinism doesn't allow an alternative choice.

Nope. A decision is a decision! The fact that it was inevitable changes nothing. Where it happened, specifically within my own neural network, means that it was I and no other object in the universe, that actually made that choice.

The fact that you squeeze the process into "a response to stimuli" doesn't change anything other than to remove the key distinction between the two different sets of stimuli: one set that includes the guy with a gun (coercion) and the other set without him (free will).

You can't go around destroying meaningful distinctions without losing significant information. That distorts the truth. So, stop doing that. And tell the people you are quoting to stop doing that.

The action that taken is the only possible action.

Wrong.
Literal Fact: The action that is taken is the only action that will be taken.
Figurative deception: It is AS IF it were the only action that can be taken. Which is literally false.

Nothing else is possible.

Wrong again.
Literal Fact: If things were different then other things could have happened instead.
Figurative deception: It was AS IF there were no other possibilities. Which is literally false.

Outcomes are determined by how events interact and unfold.

Of course. And if things were different, then they would have interacted and unfolded differently. When anyone says "I could have done something else", it always carries the implication that (1) "I did not do something else" and that (2) "things would have had to be different in order for me to have done something else".

Nobody can take a different option.

Wrong.
Literal fact: If things were different, then I would have chosen differently. That is what "I could have done otherwise" literally implies. It always carries two logical implications: (1) things would have had to be different and (2) they weren't, so, as a matter of fact, I did not do otherwise.
Figurative deception: Things were not different, so it is AS IF I could not have chosen differently under different circumstances.

Which is, as pointed out, why freedom is incompatible with determinism.

There is no freedom without reliable cause and effect. Therefore, freedom, the ability to do what we want, requires a world of reliable causation, where our chosen actions have a reliable effect. Without it, any intention we might have would be ineffectual.

The only question you have is whether determinism is allowed to contradict freedom or is allowed to enable it.

I say that the only way that determinism can be true is if it affirms our ability to do things.

If we are not doing what we do, then who or what is doing it?
If we are not choosing what we do, then who or what is doing the choosing?

If everything has a cause (determinism), then ante up the cause, or remain silent.

1. You do what you do, in any given situation, because of the way you are.
2. In order to be ultimately responsible for what you do, you have to be ultimately responsible for the way you are—at least in certain crucial mental aspects.
3. But you cannot be ultimately responsible for the way you are in any respect at all.
4. So you can’t be ultimately responsible for what you do. - Galen Strawson.

Let's straighten out Mr. Strawson with a little pragmatism. We "hold responsible" the meaningful and relevant causes of an event. If it is a harmful event, then we need to correct the causes if we want to avoid future harm. If the cause of the harm is coercion, then we hold the guy with the gun responsible and subject him to correction. If a mental illness is responsible for the behavior, then we treat the illness in a secure psychiatric facility. If the cause of the harm is a person's deliberate choice to profit at the expense of others, then we attempt to correct the offender's way of thinking about these things in the future, through rehabilitation if possible, or through permanent incarceration if necessary to prevent significant harm.

The "cash-value" of the notion of responsibility is that it identifies the nature of the cause and once the cause is known we have a better idea what needs to be done. That's ultimately what responsibility is all about.

Strawson's notion that we must concern ourselves with "ultimate responsibility" rather than "practical responsibility" is a dead end, because there is nothing we can do about the Big Bang or Causal Necessity or Determinism. Thus, any "cause" that cannot be corrected or altered in any way obviously cannot be held responsible. Such causes are irrelevant, and a waste of time to bring to the table. So, Mr. Strawson, please go sit at the children's table.

You seem to keep imagining that free will has to do with some kind of free floating will that is outside of the string of causation. Is that what you think free will is? Do you have any evidence to support that notion?

If not, then it would seem insincere to insist that free will be something that you believe cannot exist. That would be the ultimate straw man argument. ...

Acting is unavoidable. We have to act. How we act is determined by the information we have. The information we have is acquired by the brain (acting upon the brain) and presented in conscious form and action.

Close, but please continue.

We thus know what effects the behaviour of others, the threat of punishment deters many (but not all), from behaving badly, therefore we have rules and regulations with penalties attached.

Yes, of course.

Information acts upon the brain and modifies behaviour, enables skills and insights that would not be otherwise possible.

Almost, but not quite. The brain/person acquires new information, decides whether it affects the person or not, and if it seems relevant to the person's welfare, accepts the information into its working model of reality. The information itself is not performing these functions upon the brain, rather, the brain is performing these functions upon the information. The brain transforms the information into "skills and insights" that open it to imagining new possibilities, new options, new alternatives. You know, all the stuff involved in choosing.

And the reason rehabilitation provides information, through counseling, education, skills training, etc., is to help the offender to make better choices in the future.

Free will, which is just an idea, plays no part.

No. Free will is the whole point of providing the information, so that the criminal offender will make better choices, on his own, and no longer commit harmful criminal acts upon others.

Free will is when the offender chooses for himself what he will do. And it is precisely those choices that rehabilitation is attempting to modify. There's nothing rehab can do about the cases where the someone is holding a gun to the offender's head forcing him to do something. Rehabilitation can only affect the offender's own choices.

One cannot tell the offender that, due to determinism, he had no control over his past behavior, because determinism will still be the case after he is released, and this means that he will also have no control over his future behavior! See the problem?

''Behavior modification is the process of changing patterns of human behavior over the long term using various motivational techniques, mainly consequences (negative reinforcement) and rewards (positive reinforcement). The ultimate goal is to swap objectionable, problematic, or disagreeable behaviors with more positive, desirable behaviors.''

Great advice for dog training. But we don't usually use such blatant manipulation of humans, not even in prison settings. The goal of rehabilitation is to change how a person actually thinks about their behavior, so that they make better choices, on their own, without someone with a doggie treat around to provide reinforcement.

Interaction;
''To successfully interact with objects in the environment, sensory evidence must be continuously acquired, interpreted, and used to guide appropriate motor responses. For example, when driving, a red light should motivate a motor command to depress the brake pedal. Single-unit recording studies have established that simple sensorimotor transformations are mediated by the same neurons that ultimately guide the behavioral response. However, it is also possible that these sensorimotor regions are the recipients of a modality-independent decision signal that is computed elsewhere.''

You keep posting these references to irrelevant information. We're talking about someone deciding whether to rob a convenience store. We're not talking about habits acquired through repetition of sensorimotor functions. Please be more selective in your sources. Thanks!

Consciousness, determined by inputs and neural architecture, has no special privileges within a determined system. Free will plays no part in information processing, response, behaviour modification, intelligence or learning.

Free will, being a choice we make for ourselves to do something, would include our choice to pick up a book, or attend a college, specifically to acquire the information we wish to process.

An intelligent system is not necessarily a 'free will' system. The brain is an intelligent parallel processor.

Intelligence is about providing our species with behavioral adaptability. Unlike species that can only act upon instincts, we get to choose what we will do. We imagine new possibilities, like flying in the sky as birds do, and we imagine creating a machine that enables flight, and we imagine different ways to do this (propeller, jet, helicopter), and we choose which possibility we will actualize, and different people choose other possibilities. And that is how the single actual future comes about, by us deciding for ourselves what we will do.

Within the domain of human influence, the single inevitable future will be chosen by us from among the many possible futures that we can imagine.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

The external world is the 'god' that acts upon the brain. The external world is the source of information that a brain responds to. Responding, not according to its will, but its unchosen neural architecture and information processing activity.

No, the external world is just a planet we live on. It doesn't care whether our species survives or not. The interests that motivate us are the biological drives to survive, thrive, and reproduce, that exist within us. The control that causally determines what we will deliberately do is a choosing operation performed by our own brains. Our fate is in our own hands and our future is one of our own choosing.

 

[fromderinside]

We see problems differently. I am not going to choose just among the options available to me while you obviously are doing so.

That said, our objective methodology has produced impressive results and we are learning more all the time. What we 'know' serves very well as a stand-in for material reality. It is usable for most material endeavors. Our telescope/microscope of understanding is useful in choosing probable outcomes of more than we can test, but it is nowhere near capable of deriving all.

Let's explore the metaphysics here using an example.

I have a function written down. It says y=x^2

I also have a line drawn out on a piece of paper.

I cannot know all values this paper describes. You could not fit the description of even something so simple as an entire parabola in the entirety of every particle in the observable universe, or even in the entire interactive universe WRT your reference frame. All that is "big" but infinity is still "bigger".

You cannot, in this universe, "know" all of Y=X^2.

However you can understand it: I can describe just for the asking what any given Y value is for any given X. I could operate on Y=X^2 and get a description of all functions that intersect through this set. I can understand that set, too.

I just can't know every point.

I can do the same thing with a function that instead of describing an infinite universe of 'parabola' defines instead 'universe like ours', and the nice thing about a 'universe like ours' is that they are robust enough to contain a description of their own architecture, a macroscale object that behaves faithfully as it's microscale behaves.

In many ways there are things also that can be understood but not predicted: we can understand the series of events that happens from (particle configuration A) that is unstable and capable of forming one of (set of outcomes from destabilization event). We can understand that this will resolve in a random selection from an infinite set. We can understand 'random' too, and the character of the infinite* set. We can't "know" what will happen but that is not a lack of understanding, but in many ways, an attainment of it.

*Possibly finite? I wonder at times if there is a quantization happening with the interaction wave that behaves more like a graph connection or association than a macroscale "impact"

I'll make one more attempt to communicate.

At the time of the renaissance, Scholars were counting angels on the heads of pins.

Archimedes' didn't get through around 200 BC when he noted mass displaces liquids with "Eureka", Western white man ignored the material demonstration and continued counting angels on pinheads. It took Galileo with a telescope found satellites orbiting around Jupiter tried to publish those material findings in Religious Press to kick start material analysis worked quite well explaining physical behavior while Rational analysis just generated interesting truisms and fallacies. Yeah, it didn't hurt that the printing press was there to reproduce the discussions.

https://www.bnl.gov/newsroom/news.php?a=119023 Collisions of Light Produce Matter/Antimatter from Pure Energy

"The primary finding is that pairs of electrons and positrons—particles of matter and antimatter—can be created directly by colliding very energetic photons, which are quantum “packets” of light. This conversion of energetic light into matter is a direct consequence of Einstein’s famous E=mc2 equation, which states that energy and matter (or mass) are interchangeable. Nuclear reactions in the sun and at nuclear power plants regularly convert matter into energy. Now scientists have converted light energy directly into matter in a single step."

The God particle was discovered when the Hadron collider accelerated protons to 99.9999991% of the speed of light, or three meters per second less than light speed. Accomplishing that acceleration looks to require about 13 teraelectronvolts.

Obviously, exponentially higher energies of accelerating force may produce theory-changing results. That is why I look to getting a bit closer to the energies at the big bang which is theorized to be a lot higher than those possible with Hadron Collider before I'm ready to say "we know it."

We will come up with a few new wrinkles to produce similar effects.

I know you think its strange but you know it's coming.

The Next Particle Collider Will Be Three Times Bigger Than the LHCIt will also be seven times more powerful https://futurism.com/the-next-particle-collider-will-be-three-times-bigger-than-the-lhc​

Your patronizing bullshit aside, you're still failing, not to communicate but to understand.

I am not saying that we know the exact architecture yet that describes and "understands" all that we see.

You are arguing "we do not know what the universe behaves like in some edge cases" and then pushing that argument into an implication that the universe cannot possibly contain a complete understanding of itself.

I can create a universe of quanta that contains a description of its own architecture, and which even executes exactly the host OS in a client. I can even make a universe which implements the behavior of instructions not directly present on the metal.

Honestly, it's not dissimilar from a tarball I saw the other day that decompresses to itself. Yes, you heard that right. The fact that these things can and do exist implies the universe can host an understanding of itself.

We're cascading back to a world of belief controlled by impulse and mood rather than toward a world of material knowledge subject to what we know about it. If a person uses free will which he hasn't or understands which he doesn't he ultimately exists within the narrow range of strongly held beliefs of his own ability to understand and work. You create a digital universe that is self-generated therefore it works from self to realization rather than from material necessity to material execution.

How then can you claim you understand? You only do what you believe based on those beliefs rather than do what is demanded of you by circumstances around you.

No, we aren't. We are exploring "mathematical possibilities" rather than "disproved and this definitely false bullshit".

I have disproved you through example: universes, especially ones with fixed quanta that can in macroscale be mutated to reliably mirror the statistical realities of their resolution, are self-understandable. As to whether they will ever be self-understood is a different matter.

You have three times made an argument from incredulity.

How have we been posting here and you have not in fact once recalled something I have said an obnoxious number of times:

Trust But Verify

This is what it means to doubt.

I have verified that a universe of rearrangeable stuff capable of arbitrary expression of metaphysics may be capable of describing itself in abstract, as to the way that stuff may be rearranged.

As we have seen, we are capable of doing that thing.

You understand completely when what you trust continues to fail to be disproven despite effort, hopefully well directed at any invention of fancy that people place a God into.

Just because you cannot say certainly or honestly from inside "I am right *", you can definitely actually BE right.

You're right you can create whatever you please within known circumstances or not. You aren't Appling acknowledged material knowledge though. You are creating in your mind then replicating on screens.

That's not what I'm talking about. I am talking about integrating all knowable material information within a mathematical statement. We will never get there. We can't because we don't and won't have access to enough information about the world in which we live to develop such a construct. All statements will have errors so large as to ultimately be unusable.

You can invent much. You might actually hit upon the correct solution but you won't be able to verify it because you will always be missing critical information. It's that verify thing that will get you if nothing else.

I'm convinced we will never get to the point of imagining the possibility of what is really the world. Just too much information beyond our grasp.

Genetics tells us there were as few as several thousand humans about 40 thousand years ago. We are now approaching eight billion persons. Even if we collineate available systems, those within our practical reach, there will never be enough to assure we explore the entirety of the universe. Not enough time of universe existence for that.

Do your damnest, you won't be able to imagine even what will be humanity in 10K years.

 

[Jarhyn]

We see problems differently. I am not going to choose just among the options available to me while you obviously are doing so.

That said, our objective methodology has produced impressive results and we are learning more all the time. What we 'know' serves very well as a stand-in for material reality. It is usable for most material endeavors. Our telescope/microscope of understanding is useful in choosing probable outcomes of more than we can test, but it is nowhere near capable of deriving all.

Let's explore the metaphysics here using an example.

I have a function written down. It says y=x^2

I also have a line drawn out on a piece of paper.

I cannot know all values this paper describes. You could not fit the description of even something so simple as an entire parabola in the entirety of every particle in the observable universe, or even in the entire interactive universe WRT your reference frame. All that is "big" but infinity is still "bigger".

You cannot, in this universe, "know" all of Y=X^2.

However you can understand it: I can describe just for the asking what any given Y value is for any given X. I could operate on Y=X^2 and get a description of all functions that intersect through this set. I can understand that set, too.

I just can't know every point.

I can do the same thing with a function that instead of describing an infinite universe of 'parabola' defines instead 'universe like ours', and the nice thing about a 'universe like ours' is that they are robust enough to contain a description of their own architecture, a macroscale object that behaves faithfully as it's microscale behaves.

In many ways there are things also that can be understood but not predicted: we can understand the series of events that happens from (particle configuration A) that is unstable and capable of forming one of (set of outcomes from destabilization event). We can understand that this will resolve in a random selection from an infinite set. We can understand 'random' too, and the character of the infinite* set. We can't "know" what will happen but that is not a lack of understanding, but in many ways, an attainment of it.

*Possibly finite? I wonder at times if there is a quantization happening with the interaction wave that behaves more like a graph connection or association than a macroscale "impact"

I'll make one more attempt to communicate.

At the time of the renaissance, Scholars were counting angels on the heads of pins.

Archimedes' didn't get through around 200 BC when he noted mass displaces liquids with "Eureka", Western white man ignored the material demonstration and continued counting angels on pinheads. It took Galileo with a telescope found satellites orbiting around Jupiter tried to publish those material findings in Religious Press to kick start material analysis worked quite well explaining physical behavior while Rational analysis just generated interesting truisms and fallacies. Yeah, it didn't hurt that the printing press was there to reproduce the discussions.

https://www.bnl.gov/newsroom/news.php?a=119023 Collisions of Light Produce Matter/Antimatter from Pure Energy

"The primary finding is that pairs of electrons and positrons—particles of matter and antimatter—can be created directly by colliding very energetic photons, which are quantum “packets” of light. This conversion of energetic light into matter is a direct consequence of Einstein’s famous E=mc2 equation, which states that energy and matter (or mass) are interchangeable. Nuclear reactions in the sun and at nuclear power plants regularly convert matter into energy. Now scientists have converted light energy directly into matter in a single step."

The God particle was discovered when the Hadron collider accelerated protons to 99.9999991% of the speed of light, or three meters per second less than light speed. Accomplishing that acceleration looks to require about 13 teraelectronvolts.

Obviously, exponentially higher energies of accelerating force may produce theory-changing results. That is why I look to getting a bit closer to the energies at the big bang which is theorized to be a lot higher than those possible with Hadron Collider before I'm ready to say "we know it."

We will come up with a few new wrinkles to produce similar effects.

I know you think its strange but you know it's coming.

The Next Particle Collider Will Be Three Times Bigger Than the LHCIt will also be seven times more powerful https://futurism.com/the-next-particle-collider-will-be-three-times-bigger-than-the-lhc​

Your patronizing bullshit aside, you're still failing, not to communicate but to understand.

I am not saying that we know the exact architecture yet that describes and "understands" all that we see.

You are arguing "we do not know what the universe behaves like in some edge cases" and then pushing that argument into an implication that the universe cannot possibly contain a complete understanding of itself.

I can create a universe of quanta that contains a description of its own architecture, and which even executes exactly the host OS in a client. I can even make a universe which implements the behavior of instructions not directly present on the metal.

Honestly, it's not dissimilar from a tarball I saw the other day that decompresses to itself. Yes, you heard that right. The fact that these things can and do exist implies the universe can host an understanding of itself.

We're cascading back to a world of belief controlled by impulse and mood rather than toward a world of material knowledge subject to what we know about it. If a person uses free will which he hasn't or understands which he doesn't he ultimately exists within the narrow range of strongly held beliefs of his own ability to understand and work. You create a digital universe that is self-generated therefore it works from self to realization rather than from material necessity to material execution.

How then can you claim you understand? You only do what you believe based on those beliefs rather than do what is demanded of you by circumstances around you.

No, we aren't. We are exploring "mathematical possibilities" rather than "disproved and this definitely false bullshit".

I have disproved you through example: universes, especially ones with fixed quanta that can in macroscale be mutated to reliably mirror the statistical realities of their resolution, are self-understandable. As to whether they will ever be self-understood is a different matter.

You have three times made an argument from incredulity.

How have we been posting here and you have not in fact once recalled something I have said an obnoxious number of times:

Trust But Verify

This is what it means to doubt.

I have verified that a universe of rearrangeable stuff capable of arbitrary expression of metaphysics may be capable of describing itself in abstract, as to the way that stuff may be rearranged.

As we have seen, we are capable of doing that thing.

You understand completely when what you trust continues to fail to be disproven despite effort, hopefully well directed at any invention of fancy that people place a God into.

Just because you cannot say certainly or honestly from inside "I am right *", you can definitely actually BE right.

You're right you can create whatever you please within known circumstances or not. You aren't Appling acknowledged material knowledge though. You are creating in your mind then replicating on screens.

That's not what I'm talking about. I am talking about integrating all knowable material information within a mathematical statement. We will never get there.

And there's the faith without verification. I have disproved that this is a reasonable assertion to make of "universes" and have not in 40 years from you or anyone else, especially the hard determinists, an argument that adequately demands this.

I acknowledge that the "seed" may not be calculable, but if the basis is known, and the seed is guessed, it will work all the same to be algorithm+architecture+seed to do what you describe.

We are most of the way to the real questions already, for which answers may be solved. If the basis of sequence is unsolvable, then the extent of possible understanding is algorithm+architecture, which let's you extrapolate any chemistry you please arbitrarily. We are talking a different kind of "knowability" perhaps even.

Verification happens through disproof.

We can't because we don't and won't have access to enough information about the world in which we live to develop such a construct. All statements will have errors so large as to ultimately be unusable.

There's that blind faith again.

You don't know what we will and won't be able to figure out and test.

You can invent much. You might actually hit upon the correct solution but you won't be able to verify it because you will always be missing critical information. It's that verify thing that will get you if nothing else.

So Mr scientist, how does verification work in the scientific method?

That's rhetorical. The answer is "disproof".

You put your weight on the understanding and see if it holds firm under you, and then you kick it as hard as you can repeatedly every way you can think of until nothing you can do displaces it and then you walk past it, but with a bit of distrust, still, and maybe an occasional thought at how to keep prodding it.

Either way, that won't tell us a lick or tittle about the metaphysics. I mean, you need to know a damn lot of metaphysics to derive physics that way, but it does not add stuff like "what is the series of moves that will beat a grandmaster at the next game you play with him".

This is not just reality but metaphysics, everything about all levels of every abstraction that may ever be expressed, and the nature of many things that may be expressed in different frameworks.

Rightly, this set U is something that is not coherent, is proven incoherent in set theory.

I'm convinced we will never get to the point of imagining the possibility of what is really the world. Just too much information beyond our grasp.

Genetics tells us there were as few as several thousand humans about 40 thousand years ago. We are now approaching eight billion persons. Even if we collineate available systems, those within our practical reach, there will never be enough to assure we explore the entirety of the universe. Not enough time of universe existence for that.

My point here is that this is exactly what I'm talking about.

You do not need to explore the universe to know based on it's statistical realities, that some thing can or cannot be expressed at the physical level of reality, or more appropriately, to describe the behavior of the thing so constructed.

It's just generally more useful to describe higher abstractions than the physical.

At any rate we probably won't make it off this rock; I expect that the scorpion will sting us before we get across.

The best we may explore it is glorying in what it may do, in naming it, and knowing the words of creation before what it does do is open the door to a bad-faith actor ending us all.

 

[fromderinside]

We see problems differently. I am not going to choose just among the options available to me while you obviously are doing so.

That said, our objective methodology has produced impressive results and we are learning more all the time. What we 'know' serves very well as a stand-in for material reality. It is usable for most material endeavors. Our telescope/microscope of understanding is useful in choosing probable outcomes of more than we can test, but it is nowhere near capable of deriving all.

Let's explore the metaphysics here using an example.

I have a function written down. It says y=x^2

I also have a line drawn out on a piece of paper.

I cannot know all values this paper describes. You could not fit the description of even something so simple as an entire parabola in the entirety of every particle in the observable universe, or even in the entire interactive universe WRT your reference frame. All that is "big" but infinity is still "bigger".

You cannot, in this universe, "know" all of Y=X^2.

However you can understand it: I can describe just for the asking what any given Y value is for any given X. I could operate on Y=X^2 and get a description of all functions that intersect through this set. I can understand that set, too.

I just can't know every point.

I can do the same thing with a function that instead of describing an infinite universe of 'parabola' defines instead 'universe like ours', and the nice thing about a 'universe like ours' is that they are robust enough to contain a description of their own architecture, a macroscale object that behaves faithfully as it's microscale behaves.

In many ways there are things also that can be understood but not predicted: we can understand the series of events that happens from (particle configuration A) that is unstable and capable of forming one of (set of outcomes from destabilization event). We can understand that this will resolve in a random selection from an infinite set. We can understand 'random' too, and the character of the infinite* set. We can't "know" what will happen but that is not a lack of understanding, but in many ways, an attainment of it.

*Possibly finite? I wonder at times if there is a quantization happening with the interaction wave that behaves more like a graph connection or association than a macroscale "impact"

I'll make one more attempt to communicate.

At the time of the renaissance, Scholars were counting angels on the heads of pins.

Archimedes' didn't get through around 200 BC when he noted mass displaces liquids with "Eureka", Western white man ignored the material demonstration and continued counting angels on pinheads. It took Galileo with a telescope found satellites orbiting around Jupiter tried to publish those material findings in Religious Press to kick start material analysis worked quite well explaining physical behavior while Rational analysis just generated interesting truisms and fallacies. Yeah, it didn't hurt that the printing press was there to reproduce the discussions.

https://www.bnl.gov/newsroom/news.php?a=119023 Collisions of Light Produce Matter/Antimatter from Pure Energy

"The primary finding is that pairs of electrons and positrons—particles of matter and antimatter—can be created directly by colliding very energetic photons, which are quantum “packets” of light. This conversion of energetic light into matter is a direct consequence of Einstein’s famous E=mc2 equation, which states that energy and matter (or mass) are interchangeable. Nuclear reactions in the sun and at nuclear power plants regularly convert matter into energy. Now scientists have converted light energy directly into matter in a single step."

The God particle was discovered when the Hadron collider accelerated protons to 99.9999991% of the speed of light, or three meters per second less than light speed. Accomplishing that acceleration looks to require about 13 teraelectronvolts.

Obviously, exponentially higher energies of accelerating force may produce theory-changing results. That is why I look to getting a bit closer to the energies at the big bang which is theorized to be a lot higher than those possible with Hadron Collider before I'm ready to say "we know it."

We will come up with a few new wrinkles to produce similar effects.

I know you think its strange but you know it's coming.

The Next Particle Collider Will Be Three Times Bigger Than the LHCIt will also be seven times more powerful https://futurism.com/the-next-particle-collider-will-be-three-times-bigger-than-the-lhc​

Your patronizing bullshit aside, you're still failing, not to communicate but to understand.

I am not saying that we know the exact architecture yet that describes and "understands" all that we see.

You are arguing "we do not know what the universe behaves like in some edge cases" and then pushing that argument into an implication that the universe cannot possibly contain a complete understanding of itself.

I can create a universe of quanta that contains a description of its own architecture, and which even executes exactly the host OS in a client. I can even make a universe which implements the behavior of instructions not directly present on the metal.

Honestly, it's not dissimilar from a tarball I saw the other day that decompresses to itself. Yes, you heard that right. The fact that these things can and do exist implies the universe can host an understanding of itself.

We're cascading back to a world of belief controlled by impulse and mood rather than toward a world of material knowledge subject to what we know about it. If a person uses free will which he hasn't or understands which he doesn't he ultimately exists within the narrow range of strongly held beliefs of his own ability to understand and work. You create a digital universe that is self-generated therefore it works from self to realization rather than from material necessity to material execution.

How then can you claim you understand? You only do what you believe based on those beliefs rather than do what is demanded of you by circumstances around you.

No, we aren't. We are exploring "mathematical possibilities" rather than "disproved and this definitely false bullshit".

I have disproved you through example: universes, especially ones with fixed quanta that can in macroscale be mutated to reliably mirror the statistical realities of their resolution, are self-understandable. As to whether they will ever be self-understood is a different matter.

You have three times made an argument from incredulity.

How have we been posting here and you have not in fact once recalled something I have said an obnoxious number of times:

Trust But Verify

This is what it means to doubt.

I have verified that a universe of rearrangeable stuff capable of arbitrary expression of metaphysics may be capable of describing itself in abstract, as to the way that stuff may be rearranged.

As we have seen, we are capable of doing that thing.

You understand completely when what you trust continues to fail to be disproven despite effort, hopefully well directed at any invention of fancy that people place a God into.

Just because you cannot say certainly or honestly from inside "I am right *", you can definitely actually BE right.

You're right you can create whatever you please within known circumstances or not. You aren't Appling acknowledged material knowledge though. You are creating in your mind then replicating on screens.

That's not what I'm talking about. I am talking about integrating all knowable material information within a mathematical statement. We will never get there.

And there's the faith without verification. I have disproved that this is a reasonable assertion to make of "universes" and have not in 40 years from you or anyone else, especially the hard determinists, an argument that adequately demands this.

I acknowledge that the "seed" may not be calculable, but if the basis is known, and the seed is guessed, it will work all the same to be algorithm+architecture+seed to do what you describe.

We are most of the way to the real questions already, for which answers may be solved. If the basis of sequence is unsolvable, then the extent of possible understanding is algorithm+architecture, which let's you extrapolate any chemistry you please arbitrarily. We are talking a different kind of "knowability" perhaps even.

Verification happens through disproof.

We can't because we don't and won't have access to enough information about the world in which we live to develop such a construct. All statements will have errors so large as to ultimately be unusable.

There's that blind faith again.

You don't know what we will and won't be able to figure out and test.

You can invent much. You might actually hit upon the correct solution but you won't be able to verify it because you will always be missing critical information. It's that verify thing that will get you if nothing else.

So Mr scientist, how does verification work in the scientific method?

That's rhetorical. The answer is "disproof".

You put your weight on the understanding and see if it holds firm under you, and then you kick it as hard as you can repeatedly every way you can think of until nothing you can do displaces it and then you walk past it, but with a bit of distrust, still, and maybe an occasional thought at how to keep prodding it.

Either way, that won't tell us a lick or tittle about the metaphysics. I mean, you need to know a damn lot of metaphysics to derive physics that way, but it does not add stuff like "what is the series of moves that will beat a grandmaster at the next game you play with him".

This is not just reality but metaphysics, everything about all levels of every abstraction that may ever be expressed, and the nature of many things that may be expressed in different frameworks.

Rightly, this set U is something that is not coherent, is proven incoherent in set theory.

I'm convinced we will never get to the point of imagining the possibility of what is really the world. Just too much information beyond our grasp.

Genetics tells us there were as few as several thousand humans about 40 thousand years ago. We are now approaching eight billion persons. Even if we collineate available systems, those within our practical reach, there will never be enough to assure we explore the entirety of the universe. Not enough time of universe existence for that.

My point here is that this is exactly what I'm talking about.

You do not need to explore the universe to know based on it's statistical realities, that some thing can or cannot be expressed at the physical level of reality, or more appropriately, to describe the behavior of the thing so constructed.

It's just generally more useful to describe higher abstractions than the physical.

At any rate we probably won't make it off this rock; I expect that the scorpion will sting us before we get across.

The best we may explore it is glorying in what it may do, in naming it, and knowing the words of creation before what it does do is open the door to a bad-faith actor ending us all.

We both know what the other is saying. I prefer verify to disproof or falsify because every new query provides another test of whether the theory stands. If verification fails then one needs to design additional corollaries or theorems for theory then test again.

We don't usually try to disprove something. We generally try to verify, improve, or modify something already developed and tested. When one theory among a system of theories fails the other elements become subject to test. It is a consistent systematic development of material support, test, for the theory on which theory stands.

I'm sorry. Metaphysical is always subjective based and that is exactly why Rationalism didn't work out. Forget abstraction ladders and such. Not useful. Just apply material methods, operationally defined processes and good experimental practices. You shouldn't go wrong.

 

[Jarhyn]

We see problems differently. I am not going to choose just among the options available to me while you obviously are doing so.

That said, our objective methodology has produced impressive results and we are learning more all the time. What we 'know' serves very well as a stand-in for material reality. It is usable for most material endeavors. Our telescope/microscope of understanding is useful in choosing probable outcomes of more than we can test, but it is nowhere near capable of deriving all.

Let's explore the metaphysics here using an example.

I have a function written down. It says y=x^2

I also have a line drawn out on a piece of paper.

I cannot know all values this paper describes. You could not fit the description of even something so simple as an entire parabola in the entirety of every particle in the observable universe, or even in the entire interactive universe WRT your reference frame. All that is "big" but infinity is still "bigger".

You cannot, in this universe, "know" all of Y=X^2.

However you can understand it: I can describe just for the asking what any given Y value is for any given X. I could operate on Y=X^2 and get a description of all functions that intersect through this set. I can understand that set, too.

I just can't know every point.

I can do the same thing with a function that instead of describing an infinite universe of 'parabola' defines instead 'universe like ours', and the nice thing about a 'universe like ours' is that they are robust enough to contain a description of their own architecture, a macroscale object that behaves faithfully as it's microscale behaves.

In many ways there are things also that can be understood but not predicted: we can understand the series of events that happens from (particle configuration A) that is unstable and capable of forming one of (set of outcomes from destabilization event). We can understand that this will resolve in a random selection from an infinite set. We can understand 'random' too, and the character of the infinite* set. We can't "know" what will happen but that is not a lack of understanding, but in many ways, an attainment of it.

*Possibly finite? I wonder at times if there is a quantization happening with the interaction wave that behaves more like a graph connection or association than a macroscale "impact"

I'll make one more attempt to communicate.

At the time of the renaissance, Scholars were counting angels on the heads of pins.

Archimedes' didn't get through around 200 BC when he noted mass displaces liquids with "Eureka", Western white man ignored the material demonstration and continued counting angels on pinheads. It took Galileo with a telescope found satellites orbiting around Jupiter tried to publish those material findings in Religious Press to kick start material analysis worked quite well explaining physical behavior while Rational analysis just generated interesting truisms and fallacies. Yeah, it didn't hurt that the printing press was there to reproduce the discussions.

https://www.bnl.gov/newsroom/news.php?a=119023 Collisions of Light Produce Matter/Antimatter from Pure Energy

"The primary finding is that pairs of electrons and positrons—particles of matter and antimatter—can be created directly by colliding very energetic photons, which are quantum “packets” of light. This conversion of energetic light into matter is a direct consequence of Einstein’s famous E=mc2 equation, which states that energy and matter (or mass) are interchangeable. Nuclear reactions in the sun and at nuclear power plants regularly convert matter into energy. Now scientists have converted light energy directly into matter in a single step."

The God particle was discovered when the Hadron collider accelerated protons to 99.9999991% of the speed of light, or three meters per second less than light speed. Accomplishing that acceleration looks to require about 13 teraelectronvolts.

Obviously, exponentially higher energies of accelerating force may produce theory-changing results. That is why I look to getting a bit closer to the energies at the big bang which is theorized to be a lot higher than those possible with Hadron Collider before I'm ready to say "we know it."

We will come up with a few new wrinkles to produce similar effects.

I know you think its strange but you know it's coming.

The Next Particle Collider Will Be Three Times Bigger Than the LHCIt will also be seven times more powerful https://futurism.com/the-next-particle-collider-will-be-three-times-bigger-than-the-lhc​

Your patronizing bullshit aside, you're still failing, not to communicate but to understand.

I am not saying that we know the exact architecture yet that describes and "understands" all that we see.

You are arguing "we do not know what the universe behaves like in some edge cases" and then pushing that argument into an implication that the universe cannot possibly contain a complete understanding of itself.

I can create a universe of quanta that contains a description of its own architecture, and which even executes exactly the host OS in a client. I can even make a universe which implements the behavior of instructions not directly present on the metal.

Honestly, it's not dissimilar from a tarball I saw the other day that decompresses to itself. Yes, you heard that right. The fact that these things can and do exist implies the universe can host an understanding of itself.

We're cascading back to a world of belief controlled by impulse and mood rather than toward a world of material knowledge subject to what we know about it. If a person uses free will which he hasn't or understands which he doesn't he ultimately exists within the narrow range of strongly held beliefs of his own ability to understand and work. You create a digital universe that is self-generated therefore it works from self to realization rather than from material necessity to material execution.

How then can you claim you understand? You only do what you believe based on those beliefs rather than do what is demanded of you by circumstances around you.

No, we aren't. We are exploring "mathematical possibilities" rather than "disproved and this definitely false bullshit".

I have disproved you through example: universes, especially ones with fixed quanta that can in macroscale be mutated to reliably mirror the statistical realities of their resolution, are self-understandable. As to whether they will ever be self-understood is a different matter.

You have three times made an argument from incredulity.

How have we been posting here and you have not in fact once recalled something I have said an obnoxious number of times:

Trust But Verify

This is what it means to doubt.

I have verified that a universe of rearrangeable stuff capable of arbitrary expression of metaphysics may be capable of describing itself in abstract, as to the way that stuff may be rearranged.

As we have seen, we are capable of doing that thing.

You understand completely when what you trust continues to fail to be disproven despite effort, hopefully well directed at any invention of fancy that people place a God into.

Just because you cannot say certainly or honestly from inside "I am right *", you can definitely actually BE right.

You're right you can create whatever you please within known circumstances or not. You aren't Appling acknowledged material knowledge though. You are creating in your mind then replicating on screens.

That's not what I'm talking about. I am talking about integrating all knowable material information within a mathematical statement. We will never get there.

And there's the faith without verification. I have disproved that this is a reasonable assertion to make of "universes" and have not in 40 years from you or anyone else, especially the hard determinists, an argument that adequately demands this.

I acknowledge that the "seed" may not be calculable, but if the basis is known, and the seed is guessed, it will work all the same to be algorithm+architecture+seed to do what you describe.

We are most of the way to the real questions already, for which answers may be solved. If the basis of sequence is unsolvable, then the extent of possible understanding is algorithm+architecture, which let's you extrapolate any chemistry you please arbitrarily. We are talking a different kind of "knowability" perhaps even.

Verification happens through disproof.

We can't because we don't and won't have access to enough information about the world in which we live to develop such a construct. All statements will have errors so large as to ultimately be unusable.

There's that blind faith again.

You don't know what we will and won't be able to figure out and test.

You can invent much. You might actually hit upon the correct solution but you won't be able to verify it because you will always be missing critical information. It's that verify thing that will get you if nothing else.

So Mr scientist, how does verification work in the scientific method?

That's rhetorical. The answer is "disproof".

You put your weight on the understanding and see if it holds firm under you, and then you kick it as hard as you can repeatedly every way you can think of until nothing you can do displaces it and then you walk past it, but with a bit of distrust, still, and maybe an occasional thought at how to keep prodding it.

Either way, that won't tell us a lick or tittle about the metaphysics. I mean, you need to know a damn lot of metaphysics to derive physics that way, but it does not add stuff like "what is the series of moves that will beat a grandmaster at the next game you play with him".

This is not just reality but metaphysics, everything about all levels of every abstraction that may ever be expressed, and the nature of many things that may be expressed in different frameworks.

Rightly, this set U is something that is not coherent, is proven incoherent in set theory.

I'm convinced we will never get to the point of imagining the possibility of what is really the world. Just too much information beyond our grasp.

Genetics tells us there were as few as several thousand humans about 40 thousand years ago. We are now approaching eight billion persons. Even if we collineate available systems, those within our practical reach, there will never be enough to assure we explore the entirety of the universe. Not enough time of universe existence for that.

My point here is that this is exactly what I'm talking about.

You do not need to explore the universe to know based on it's statistical realities, that some thing can or cannot be expressed at the physical level of reality, or more appropriately, to describe the behavior of the thing so constructed.

It's just generally more useful to describe higher abstractions than the physical.

At any rate we probably won't make it off this rock; I expect that the scorpion will sting us before we get across.

The best we may explore it is glorying in what it may do, in naming it, and knowing the words of creation before what it does do is open the door to a bad-faith actor ending us all.

We both know what the other is saying. I prefer verify to disproof or falsify because every new query provides another test of whether the theory stands. If verification fails then one needs to design additional corollaries or theorems for theory then test again.

We don't usually try to disprove something. We generally try to verify, improve, or modify something already developed and tested. When one theory among a system of theories fails the other elements become subject to test. It is a consistent systematic development of material support, test, for the theory on which theory stands.

No. Still disproof. It's kind of like coincidence is always coincidence no matter the magnitude of causal adjacency.

Every test of a theory and manipulation of the sharpest edge of understanding is a test, another kick to the foundation, because the results making sense depend heavily on the underlying material. And every test, too, is a kick at the hypothesis at the very edge, knocking off a falsehood or failing too, and then adjusting again.

It does not matter what you prefer. Only math proves out, and implementations of a system of axioms cannot prove the axioms. There is no certainty, even in truth itself. One must always accept that one can be surprised, and wrong.

Anything else is building foolish faith.

Trust but verify.

Verify through rigorous attempts at disproof.

 

[fromderinside]

We see problems differently. I am not going to choose just among the options available to me while you obviously are doing so.

That said, our objective methodology has produced impressive results and we are learning more all the time. What we 'know' serves very well as a stand-in for material reality. It is usable for most material endeavors. Our telescope/microscope of understanding is useful in choosing probable outcomes of more than we can test, but it is nowhere near capable of deriving all.

Let's explore the metaphysics here using an example.

I have a function written down. It says y=x^2

I also have a line drawn out on a piece of paper.

I cannot know all values this paper describes. You could not fit the description of even something so simple as an entire parabola in the entirety of every particle in the observable universe, or even in the entire interactive universe WRT your reference frame. All that is "big" but infinity is still "bigger".

You cannot, in this universe, "know" all of Y=X^2.

However you can understand it: I can describe just for the asking what any given Y value is for any given X. I could operate on Y=X^2 and get a description of all functions that intersect through this set. I can understand that set, too.

I just can't know every point.

I can do the same thing with a function that instead of describing an infinite universe of 'parabola' defines instead 'universe like ours', and the nice thing about a 'universe like ours' is that they are robust enough to contain a description of their own architecture, a macroscale object that behaves faithfully as it's microscale behaves.

In many ways there are things also that can be understood but not predicted: we can understand the series of events that happens from (particle configuration A) that is unstable and capable of forming one of (set of outcomes from destabilization event). We can understand that this will resolve in a random selection from an infinite set. We can understand 'random' too, and the character of the infinite* set. We can't "know" what will happen but that is not a lack of understanding, but in many ways, an attainment of it.

*Possibly finite? I wonder at times if there is a quantization happening with the interaction wave that behaves more like a graph connection or association than a macroscale "impact"

I'll make one more attempt to communicate.

At the time of the renaissance, Scholars were counting angels on the heads of pins.

Archimedes' didn't get through around 200 BC when he noted mass displaces liquids with "Eureka", Western white man ignored the material demonstration and continued counting angels on pinheads. It took Galileo with a telescope found satellites orbiting around Jupiter tried to publish those material findings in Religious Press to kick start material analysis worked quite well explaining physical behavior while Rational analysis just generated interesting truisms and fallacies. Yeah, it didn't hurt that the printing press was there to reproduce the discussions.

https://www.bnl.gov/newsroom/news.php?a=119023 Collisions of Light Produce Matter/Antimatter from Pure Energy

"The primary finding is that pairs of electrons and positrons—particles of matter and antimatter—can be created directly by colliding very energetic photons, which are quantum “packets” of light. This conversion of energetic light into matter is a direct consequence of Einstein’s famous E=mc2 equation, which states that energy and matter (or mass) are interchangeable. Nuclear reactions in the sun and at nuclear power plants regularly convert matter into energy. Now scientists have converted light energy directly into matter in a single step."

The God particle was discovered when the Hadron collider accelerated protons to 99.9999991% of the speed of light, or three meters per second less than light speed. Accomplishing that acceleration looks to require about 13 teraelectronvolts.

Obviously, exponentially higher energies of accelerating force may produce theory-changing results. That is why I look to getting a bit closer to the energies at the big bang which is theorized to be a lot higher than those possible with Hadron Collider before I'm ready to say "we know it."

We will come up with a few new wrinkles to produce similar effects.

I know you think its strange but you know it's coming.

The Next Particle Collider Will Be Three Times Bigger Than the LHCIt will also be seven times more powerful https://futurism.com/the-next-particle-collider-will-be-three-times-bigger-than-the-lhc​

Your patronizing bullshit aside, you're still failing, not to communicate but to understand.

I am not saying that we know the exact architecture yet that describes and "understands" all that we see.

You are arguing "we do not know what the universe behaves like in some edge cases" and then pushing that argument into an implication that the universe cannot possibly contain a complete understanding of itself.

I can create a universe of quanta that contains a description of its own architecture, and which even executes exactly the host OS in a client. I can even make a universe which implements the behavior of instructions not directly present on the metal.

Honestly, it's not dissimilar from a tarball I saw the other day that decompresses to itself. Yes, you heard that right. The fact that these things can and do exist implies the universe can host an understanding of itself.

We're cascading back to a world of belief controlled by impulse and mood rather than toward a world of material knowledge subject to what we know about it. If a person uses free will which he hasn't or understands which he doesn't he ultimately exists within the narrow range of strongly held beliefs of his own ability to understand and work. You create a digital universe that is self-generated therefore it works from self to realization rather than from material necessity to material execution.

How then can you claim you understand? You only do what you believe based on those beliefs rather than do what is demanded of you by circumstances around you.

No, we aren't. We are exploring "mathematical possibilities" rather than "disproved and this definitely false bullshit".

I have disproved you through example: universes, especially ones with fixed quanta that can in macroscale be mutated to reliably mirror the statistical realities of their resolution, are self-understandable. As to whether they will ever be self-understood is a different matter.

You have three times made an argument from incredulity.

How have we been posting here and you have not in fact once recalled something I have said an obnoxious number of times:

Trust But Verify

This is what it means to doubt.

I have verified that a universe of rearrangeable stuff capable of arbitrary expression of metaphysics may be capable of describing itself in abstract, as to the way that stuff may be rearranged.

As we have seen, we are capable of doing that thing.

You understand completely when what you trust continues to fail to be disproven despite effort, hopefully well directed at any invention of fancy that people place a God into.

Just because you cannot say certainly or honestly from inside "I am right *", you can definitely actually BE right.

You're right you can create whatever you please within known circumstances or not. You aren't Appling acknowledged material knowledge though. You are creating in your mind then replicating on screens.

That's not what I'm talking about. I am talking about integrating all knowable material information within a mathematical statement. We will never get there.

And there's the faith without verification. I have disproved that this is a reasonable assertion to make of "universes" and have not in 40 years from you or anyone else, especially the hard determinists, an argument that adequately demands this.

I acknowledge that the "seed" may not be calculable, but if the basis is known, and the seed is guessed, it will work all the same to be algorithm+architecture+seed to do what you describe.

We are most of the way to the real questions already, for which answers may be solved. If the basis of sequence is unsolvable, then the extent of possible understanding is algorithm+architecture, which let's you extrapolate any chemistry you please arbitrarily. We are talking a different kind of "knowability" perhaps even.

Verification happens through disproof.

We can't because we don't and won't have access to enough information about the world in which we live to develop such a construct. All statements will have errors so large as to ultimately be unusable.

There's that blind faith again.

You don't know what we will and won't be able to figure out and test.

You can invent much. You might actually hit upon the correct solution but you won't be able to verify it because you will always be missing critical information. It's that verify thing that will get you if nothing else.

So Mr scientist, how does verification work in the scientific method?

That's rhetorical. The answer is "disproof".

You put your weight on the understanding and see if it holds firm under you, and then you kick it as hard as you can repeatedly every way you can think of until nothing you can do displaces it and then you walk past it, but with a bit of distrust, still, and maybe an occasional thought at how to keep prodding it.

Either way, that won't tell us a lick or tittle about the metaphysics. I mean, you need to know a damn lot of metaphysics to derive physics that way, but it does not add stuff like "what is the series of moves that will beat a grandmaster at the next game you play with him".

This is not just reality but metaphysics, everything about all levels of every abstraction that may ever be expressed, and the nature of many things that may be expressed in different frameworks.

Rightly, this set U is something that is not coherent, is proven incoherent in set theory.

I'm convinced we will never get to the point of imagining the possibility of what is really the world. Just too much information beyond our grasp.

Genetics tells us there were as few as several thousand humans about 40 thousand years ago. We are now approaching eight billion persons. Even if we collineate available systems, those within our practical reach, there will never be enough to assure we explore the entirety of the universe. Not enough time of universe existence for that.

My point here is that this is exactly what I'm talking about.

You do not need to explore the universe to know based on it's statistical realities, that some thing can or cannot be expressed at the physical level of reality, or more appropriately, to describe the behavior of the thing so constructed.

It's just generally more useful to describe higher abstractions than the physical.

At any rate we probably won't make it off this rock; I expect that the scorpion will sting us before we get across.

The best we may explore it is glorying in what it may do, in naming it, and knowing the words of creation before what it does do is open the door to a bad-faith actor ending us all.

We both know what the other is saying. I prefer verify to disproof or falsify because every new query provides another test of whether the theory stands. If verification fails then one needs to design additional corollaries or theorems for theory then test again.

We don't usually try to disprove something. We generally try to verify, improve, or modify something already developed and tested. When one theory among a system of theories fails the other elements become subject to test. It is a consistent systematic development of material support, test, for the theory on which theory stands.

No. Still disproof. It's kind of like coincidence is always coincidence no matter the magnitude of causal adjacency.

Every test of a theory and manipulation of the sharpest edge of understanding is a test, another kick to the foundation, because the results making sense depend heavily on the underlying material. And every test, too, is a kick at the hypothesis at the very edge, knocking off a falsehood or failing too, and then adjusting again.

It does not matter what you prefer. Only math proves out, and implementations of a system of axioms cannot prove the axioms. There is no certainty, even in truth itself. One must always accept that one can be surprised, and wrong.

Anything else is building foolish faith.

Trust but verify.

Verify through rigorous attempts at disproof.

Gotta disagree. Most often theory failure comes when one tries to add new consequences to an existing theory. I've read very few papers where the Theory fails that went out to disprove a theory. It's usually because someone wants to extend the scope of data covered by a theory that leads to Theory falsification.

Most of those with axes to grind get caught up in dancing too close to the edge of proper process, are exposed and fail in that way to disprove what may be a weak theory.

Just sayin ...

 

[Jarhyn]

We see problems differently. I am not going to choose just among the options available to me while you obviously are doing so.

That said, our objective methodology has produced impressive results and we are learning more all the time. What we 'know' serves very well as a stand-in for material reality. It is usable for most material endeavors. Our telescope/microscope of understanding is useful in choosing probable outcomes of more than we can test, but it is nowhere near capable of deriving all.

Let's explore the metaphysics here using an example.

I have a function written down. It says y=x^2

I also have a line drawn out on a piece of paper.

I cannot know all values this paper describes. You could not fit the description of even something so simple as an entire parabola in the entirety of every particle in the observable universe, or even in the entire interactive universe WRT your reference frame. All that is "big" but infinity is still "bigger".

You cannot, in this universe, "know" all of Y=X^2.

However you can understand it: I can describe just for the asking what any given Y value is for any given X. I could operate on Y=X^2 and get a description of all functions that intersect through this set. I can understand that set, too.

I just can't know every point.

I can do the same thing with a function that instead of describing an infinite universe of 'parabola' defines instead 'universe like ours', and the nice thing about a 'universe like ours' is that they are robust enough to contain a description of their own architecture, a macroscale object that behaves faithfully as it's microscale behaves.

In many ways there are things also that can be understood but not predicted: we can understand the series of events that happens from (particle configuration A) that is unstable and capable of forming one of (set of outcomes from destabilization event). We can understand that this will resolve in a random selection from an infinite set. We can understand 'random' too, and the character of the infinite* set. We can't "know" what will happen but that is not a lack of understanding, but in many ways, an attainment of it.

*Possibly finite? I wonder at times if there is a quantization happening with the interaction wave that behaves more like a graph connection or association than a macroscale "impact"

I'll make one more attempt to communicate.

At the time of the renaissance, Scholars were counting angels on the heads of pins.

Archimedes' didn't get through around 200 BC when he noted mass displaces liquids with "Eureka", Western white man ignored the material demonstration and continued counting angels on pinheads. It took Galileo with a telescope found satellites orbiting around Jupiter tried to publish those material findings in Religious Press to kick start material analysis worked quite well explaining physical behavior while Rational analysis just generated interesting truisms and fallacies. Yeah, it didn't hurt that the printing press was there to reproduce the discussions.

https://www.bnl.gov/newsroom/news.php?a=119023 Collisions of Light Produce Matter/Antimatter from Pure Energy

"The primary finding is that pairs of electrons and positrons—particles of matter and antimatter—can be created directly by colliding very energetic photons, which are quantum “packets” of light. This conversion of energetic light into matter is a direct consequence of Einstein’s famous E=mc2 equation, which states that energy and matter (or mass) are interchangeable. Nuclear reactions in the sun and at nuclear power plants regularly convert matter into energy. Now scientists have converted light energy directly into matter in a single step."

The God particle was discovered when the Hadron collider accelerated protons to 99.9999991% of the speed of light, or three meters per second less than light speed. Accomplishing that acceleration looks to require about 13 teraelectronvolts.

Obviously, exponentially higher energies of accelerating force may produce theory-changing results. That is why I look to getting a bit closer to the energies at the big bang which is theorized to be a lot higher than those possible with Hadron Collider before I'm ready to say "we know it."

We will come up with a few new wrinkles to produce similar effects.

I know you think its strange but you know it's coming.

The Next Particle Collider Will Be Three Times Bigger Than the LHCIt will also be seven times more powerful https://futurism.com/the-next-particle-collider-will-be-three-times-bigger-than-the-lhc​

Your patronizing bullshit aside, you're still failing, not to communicate but to understand.

I am not saying that we know the exact architecture yet that describes and "understands" all that we see.

You are arguing "we do not know what the universe behaves like in some edge cases" and then pushing that argument into an implication that the universe cannot possibly contain a complete understanding of itself.

I can create a universe of quanta that contains a description of its own architecture, and which even executes exactly the host OS in a client. I can even make a universe which implements the behavior of instructions not directly present on the metal.

Honestly, it's not dissimilar from a tarball I saw the other day that decompresses to itself. Yes, you heard that right. The fact that these things can and do exist implies the universe can host an understanding of itself.

We're cascading back to a world of belief controlled by impulse and mood rather than toward a world of material knowledge subject to what we know about it. If a person uses free will which he hasn't or understands which he doesn't he ultimately exists within the narrow range of strongly held beliefs of his own ability to understand and work. You create a digital universe that is self-generated therefore it works from self to realization rather than from material necessity to material execution.

How then can you claim you understand? You only do what you believe based on those beliefs rather than do what is demanded of you by circumstances around you.

No, we aren't. We are exploring "mathematical possibilities" rather than "disproved and this definitely false bullshit".

I have disproved you through example: universes, especially ones with fixed quanta that can in macroscale be mutated to reliably mirror the statistical realities of their resolution, are self-understandable. As to whether they will ever be self-understood is a different matter.

You have three times made an argument from incredulity.

How have we been posting here and you have not in fact once recalled something I have said an obnoxious number of times:

Trust But Verify

This is what it means to doubt.

I have verified that a universe of rearrangeable stuff capable of arbitrary expression of metaphysics may be capable of describing itself in abstract, as to the way that stuff may be rearranged.

As we have seen, we are capable of doing that thing.

You understand completely when what you trust continues to fail to be disproven despite effort, hopefully well directed at any invention of fancy that people place a God into.

Just because you cannot say certainly or honestly from inside "I am right *", you can definitely actually BE right.

You're right you can create whatever you please within known circumstances or not. You aren't Appling acknowledged material knowledge though. You are creating in your mind then replicating on screens.

That's not what I'm talking about. I am talking about integrating all knowable material information within a mathematical statement. We will never get there.

And there's the faith without verification. I have disproved that this is a reasonable assertion to make of "universes" and have not in 40 years from you or anyone else, especially the hard determinists, an argument that adequately demands this.

I acknowledge that the "seed" may not be calculable, but if the basis is known, and the seed is guessed, it will work all the same to be algorithm+architecture+seed to do what you describe.

We are most of the way to the real questions already, for which answers may be solved. If the basis of sequence is unsolvable, then the extent of possible understanding is algorithm+architecture, which let's you extrapolate any chemistry you please arbitrarily. We are talking a different kind of "knowability" perhaps even.

Verification happens through disproof.

We can't because we don't and won't have access to enough information about the world in which we live to develop such a construct. All statements will have errors so large as to ultimately be unusable.

There's that blind faith again.

You don't know what we will and won't be able to figure out and test.

You can invent much. You might actually hit upon the correct solution but you won't be able to verify it because you will always be missing critical information. It's that verify thing that will get you if nothing else.

So Mr scientist, how does verification work in the scientific method?

That's rhetorical. The answer is "disproof".

You put your weight on the understanding and see if it holds firm under you, and then you kick it as hard as you can repeatedly every way you can think of until nothing you can do displaces it and then you walk past it, but with a bit of distrust, still, and maybe an occasional thought at how to keep prodding it.

Either way, that won't tell us a lick or tittle about the metaphysics. I mean, you need to know a damn lot of metaphysics to derive physics that way, but it does not add stuff like "what is the series of moves that will beat a grandmaster at the next game you play with him".

This is not just reality but metaphysics, everything about all levels of every abstraction that may ever be expressed, and the nature of many things that may be expressed in different frameworks.

Rightly, this set U is something that is not coherent, is proven incoherent in set theory.

I'm convinced we will never get to the point of imagining the possibility of what is really the world. Just too much information beyond our grasp.

Genetics tells us there were as few as several thousand humans about 40 thousand years ago. We are now approaching eight billion persons. Even if we collineate available systems, those within our practical reach, there will never be enough to assure we explore the entirety of the universe. Not enough time of universe existence for that.

My point here is that this is exactly what I'm talking about.

You do not need to explore the universe to know based on it's statistical realities, that some thing can or cannot be expressed at the physical level of reality, or more appropriately, to describe the behavior of the thing so constructed.

It's just generally more useful to describe higher abstractions than the physical.

At any rate we probably won't make it off this rock; I expect that the scorpion will sting us before we get across.

The best we may explore it is glorying in what it may do, in naming it, and knowing the words of creation before what it does do is open the door to a bad-faith actor ending us all.

We both know what the other is saying. I prefer verify to disproof or falsify because every new query provides another test of whether the theory stands. If verification fails then one needs to design additional corollaries or theorems for theory then test again.

We don't usually try to disprove something. We generally try to verify, improve, or modify something already developed and tested. When one theory among a system of theories fails the other elements become subject to test. It is a consistent systematic development of material support, test, for the theory on which theory stands.

No. Still disproof. It's kind of like coincidence is always coincidence no matter the magnitude of causal adjacency.

Every test of a theory and manipulation of the sharpest edge of understanding is a test, another kick to the foundation, because the results making sense depend heavily on the underlying material. And every test, too, is a kick at the hypothesis at the very edge, knocking off a falsehood or failing too, and then adjusting again.

It does not matter what you prefer. Only math proves out, and implementations of a system of axioms cannot prove the axioms. There is no certainty, even in truth itself. One must always accept that one can be surprised, and wrong.

Anything else is building foolish faith.

Trust but verify.

Verify through rigorous attempts at disproof.

Gotta disagree. Most often theory failure comes when one tries to add new consequences to an existing theory. I've read very few papers where the Theory fails that went out to disprove a theory. It's usually because someone wants to extend the scope of data covered by a theory that leads to Theory falsification.

Most of those with axes to grind get caught up in dancing too close to the edge of proper process, are exposed and fail in that way to disprove what may be a weak theory.

Which is why you will continue to be wrong and ignorant of it. Can't say I didn't try.

The scientific method:

Observe;
Hypothesize the basis of phenomena;
Test this hypothesis in some way designed to attempt it's disproof;
Repeat from Observe

Theory fails happen when the hypothesis is reliant in some part on some thing that the attempt to disprove renders evidence against a parent object and causes a backpropagation of disproof.

 

[fromderinside]

We see problems differently. I am not going to choose just among the options available to me while you obviously are doing so.

That said, our objective methodology has produced impressive results and we are learning more all the time. What we 'know' serves very well as a stand-in for material reality. It is usable for most material endeavors. Our telescope/microscope of understanding is useful in choosing probable outcomes of more than we can test, but it is nowhere near capable of deriving all.

Let's explore the metaphysics here using an example.

I have a function written down. It says y=x^2

I also have a line drawn out on a piece of paper.

I cannot know all values this paper describes. You could not fit the description of even something so simple as an entire parabola in the entirety of every particle in the observable universe, or even in the entire interactive universe WRT your reference frame. All that is "big" but infinity is still "bigger".

You cannot, in this universe, "know" all of Y=X^2.

However you can understand it: I can describe just for the asking what any given Y value is for any given X. I could operate on Y=X^2 and get a description of all functions that intersect through this set. I can understand that set, too.

I just can't know every point.

I can do the same thing with a function that instead of describing an infinite universe of 'parabola' defines instead 'universe like ours', and the nice thing about a 'universe like ours' is that they are robust enough to contain a description of their own architecture, a macroscale object that behaves faithfully as it's microscale behaves.

In many ways there are things also that can be understood but not predicted: we can understand the series of events that happens from (particle configuration A) that is unstable and capable of forming one of (set of outcomes from destabilization event). We can understand that this will resolve in a random selection from an infinite set. We can understand 'random' too, and the character of the infinite* set. We can't "know" what will happen but that is not a lack of understanding, but in many ways, an attainment of it.

*Possibly finite? I wonder at times if there is a quantization happening with the interaction wave that behaves more like a graph connection or association than a macroscale "impact"

I'll make one more attempt to communicate.

At the time of the renaissance, Scholars were counting angels on the heads of pins.

Archimedes' didn't get through around 200 BC when he noted mass displaces liquids with "Eureka", Western white man ignored the material demonstration and continued counting angels on pinheads. It took Galileo with a telescope found satellites orbiting around Jupiter tried to publish those material findings in Religious Press to kick start material analysis worked quite well explaining physical behavior while Rational analysis just generated interesting truisms and fallacies. Yeah, it didn't hurt that the printing press was there to reproduce the discussions.

https://www.bnl.gov/newsroom/news.php?a=119023 Collisions of Light Produce Matter/Antimatter from Pure Energy

"The primary finding is that pairs of electrons and positrons—particles of matter and antimatter—can be created directly by colliding very energetic photons, which are quantum “packets” of light. This conversion of energetic light into matter is a direct consequence of Einstein’s famous E=mc2 equation, which states that energy and matter (or mass) are interchangeable. Nuclear reactions in the sun and at nuclear power plants regularly convert matter into energy. Now scientists have converted light energy directly into matter in a single step."

The God particle was discovered when the Hadron collider accelerated protons to 99.9999991% of the speed of light, or three meters per second less than light speed. Accomplishing that acceleration looks to require about 13 teraelectronvolts.

Obviously, exponentially higher energies of accelerating force may produce theory-changing results. That is why I look to getting a bit closer to the energies at the big bang which is theorized to be a lot higher than those possible with Hadron Collider before I'm ready to say "we know it."

We will come up with a few new wrinkles to produce similar effects.

I know you think its strange but you know it's coming.

The Next Particle Collider Will Be Three Times Bigger Than the LHCIt will also be seven times more powerful https://futurism.com/the-next-particle-collider-will-be-three-times-bigger-than-the-lhc​

Your patronizing bullshit aside, you're still failing, not to communicate but to understand.

I am not saying that we know the exact architecture yet that describes and "understands" all that we see.

You are arguing "we do not know what the universe behaves like in some edge cases" and then pushing that argument into an implication that the universe cannot possibly contain a complete understanding of itself.

I can create a universe of quanta that contains a description of its own architecture, and which even executes exactly the host OS in a client. I can even make a universe which implements the behavior of instructions not directly present on the metal.

Honestly, it's not dissimilar from a tarball I saw the other day that decompresses to itself. Yes, you heard that right. The fact that these things can and do exist implies the universe can host an understanding of itself.

We're cascading back to a world of belief controlled by impulse and mood rather than toward a world of material knowledge subject to what we know about it. If a person uses free will which he hasn't or understands which he doesn't he ultimately exists within the narrow range of strongly held beliefs of his own ability to understand and work. You create a digital universe that is self-generated therefore it works from self to realization rather than from material necessity to material execution.

How then can you claim you understand? You only do what you believe based on those beliefs rather than do what is demanded of you by circumstances around you.

No, we aren't. We are exploring "mathematical possibilities" rather than "disproved and this definitely false bullshit".

I have disproved you through example: universes, especially ones with fixed quanta that can in macroscale be mutated to reliably mirror the statistical realities of their resolution, are self-understandable. As to whether they will ever be self-understood is a different matter.

You have three times made an argument from incredulity.

How have we been posting here and you have not in fact once recalled something I have said an obnoxious number of times:

Trust But Verify

This is what it means to doubt.

I have verified that a universe of rearrangeable stuff capable of arbitrary expression of metaphysics may be capable of describing itself in abstract, as to the way that stuff may be rearranged.

As we have seen, we are capable of doing that thing.

You understand completely when what you trust continues to fail to be disproven despite effort, hopefully well directed at any invention of fancy that people place a God into.

Just because you cannot say certainly or honestly from inside "I am right *", you can definitely actually BE right.

You're right you can create whatever you please within known circumstances or not. You aren't Appling acknowledged material knowledge though. You are creating in your mind then replicating on screens.

That's not what I'm talking about. I am talking about integrating all knowable material information within a mathematical statement. We will never get there.

And there's the faith without verification. I have disproved that this is a reasonable assertion to make of "universes" and have not in 40 years from you or anyone else, especially the hard determinists, an argument that adequately demands this.

I acknowledge that the "seed" may not be calculable, but if the basis is known, and the seed is guessed, it will work all the same to be algorithm+architecture+seed to do what you describe.

We are most of the way to the real questions already, for which answers may be solved. If the basis of sequence is unsolvable, then the extent of possible understanding is algorithm+architecture, which let's you extrapolate any chemistry you please arbitrarily. We are talking a different kind of "knowability" perhaps even.

Verification happens through disproof.

We can't because we don't and won't have access to enough information about the world in which we live to develop such a construct. All statements will have errors so large as to ultimately be unusable.

There's that blind faith again.

You don't know what we will and won't be able to figure out and test.

You can invent much. You might actually hit upon the correct solution but you won't be able to verify it because you will always be missing critical information. It's that verify thing that will get you if nothing else.

So Mr scientist, how does verification work in the scientific method?

That's rhetorical. The answer is "disproof".

You put your weight on the understanding and see if it holds firm under you, and then you kick it as hard as you can repeatedly every way you can think of until nothing you can do displaces it and then you walk past it, but with a bit of distrust, still, and maybe an occasional thought at how to keep prodding it.

Either way, that won't tell us a lick or tittle about the metaphysics. I mean, you need to know a damn lot of metaphysics to derive physics that way, but it does not add stuff like "what is the series of moves that will beat a grandmaster at the next game you play with him".

This is not just reality but metaphysics, everything about all levels of every abstraction that may ever be expressed, and the nature of many things that may be expressed in different frameworks.

Rightly, this set U is something that is not coherent, is proven incoherent in set theory.

I'm convinced we will never get to the point of imagining the possibility of what is really the world. Just too much information beyond our grasp.

Genetics tells us there were as few as several thousand humans about 40 thousand years ago. We are now approaching eight billion persons. Even if we collineate available systems, those within our practical reach, there will never be enough to assure we explore the entirety of the universe. Not enough time of universe existence for that.

My point here is that this is exactly what I'm talking about.

You do not need to explore the universe to know based on it's statistical realities, that some thing can or cannot be expressed at the physical level of reality, or more appropriately, to describe the behavior of the thing so constructed.

It's just generally more useful to describe higher abstractions than the physical.

At any rate we probably won't make it off this rock; I expect that the scorpion will sting us before we get across.

The best we may explore it is glorying in what it may do, in naming it, and knowing the words of creation before what it does do is open the door to a bad-faith actor ending us all.

We both know what the other is saying. I prefer verify to disproof or falsify because every new query provides another test of whether the theory stands. If verification fails then one needs to design additional corollaries or theorems for theory then test again.

We don't usually try to disprove something. We generally try to verify, improve, or modify something already developed and tested. When one theory among a system of theories fails the other elements become subject to test. It is a consistent systematic development of material support, test, for the theory on which theory stands.

No. Still disproof. It's kind of like coincidence is always coincidence no matter the magnitude of causal adjacency.

Every test of a theory and manipulation of the sharpest edge of understanding is a test, another kick to the foundation, because the results making sense depend heavily on the underlying material. And every test, too, is a kick at the hypothesis at the very edge, knocking off a falsehood or failing too, and then adjusting again.

It does not matter what you prefer. Only math proves out, and implementations of a system of axioms cannot prove the axioms. There is no certainty, even in truth itself. One must always accept that one can be surprised, and wrong.

Anything else is building foolish faith.

Trust but verify.

Verify through rigorous attempts at disproof.

Gotta disagree. Most often theory failure comes when one tries to add new consequences to an existing theory. I've read very few papers where the Theory fails that went out to disprove a theory. It's usually because someone wants to extend the scope of data covered by a theory that leads to Theory falsification.

Most of those with axes to grind get caught up in dancing too close to the edge of proper process, are exposed and fail in that way to disprove what may be a weak theory.

Which is why you will continue to be wrong and ignorant of it. Can't say I didn't try.

The scientific method:

Observe;
Hypothesize the basis of phenomena;
Test this hypothesis in some way designed to attempt it's disproof;
Repeat from Observe

Theory fails happen when the hypothesis is reliant in some part on some thing that the attempt to disprove renders evidence against a parent object and causes a backpropagation of disproof.

from:   Scientific Method

1. Define a question
2. Gather information and resources (observe)
3. Form an explanatory hypothesis
4. Test the hypothesis by performing an experiment and collecting data in a reproducible manner
5. Analyze the data
6. Interpret the data and draw conclusions that serve as a starting point for a new hypothesis
7. Publish results
8. Retest (frequently done by other scientists)

It's a good idea to not try to win an argument by proffering just a part of a method.

The System in which I published (American Institute of Physics) papers aimed primarily on extending knowledge about disciplines such as Astronomy, Physics, Psychophysics (my specialty), etc., which use experiments extensively. It is not a knockout forum. Either you don't publish much or you don't publish at all because some philosophers' options on disproof and falsification are not the engine that drives scientific advance.

 

[Copernicus]

...Nor is it a matter of me 'digging in my heels.'

In case you haven't noticed, there are two sides to this argument, compatibilism and incompatibilism. The reasons why compatibilism is inadequate to prove the proposition of free will have been explained and supported by quotes and references...

You simply prove my point in your reply. Nobody is denying that there are two sides to the argument, and your quote is nothing more than a reference to Pereboom's convoluted "manipulation argument", which has lots of critics and supporters in the literature. Like you, I don't see Pereboom seriously advocating the abolition of criminal law on the grounds that people don't actually have free will. It is really hard to argue for a conclusion that one does not take seriously, so I think that Pereboom deserves some credit for being really good at defending an absurd conclusion. Would you like references to some of his critics, or can you handle the Google search on your own?

Of course there are critics, everyone has a point of view. I have read what Pereboom's critics have to say. Just as there are critics of compatibilism.

What you say about ''advocating the abolition of criminal law on the grounds that people don't actually have free will'' indicates that you don't understand the issue.

Actions that are taken in terms of law, regulation, punishment, are made in response to human behaviour and are meant to modify or prevent undesirable activity, crime, etc.

The knowledge that there are consequences acts as a deterrent for most people, so of course nobody is suggesting abolition of the law.

Some are calling for a review.

Again;

The law
''Because most behavior is driven by brain networks we do not consciously control, the legal system will eventually be forced to shift its emphasis from retribution to a forward-looking analysis of future behavior. In the light of modern neuroscience, it no longer makes sense to ask "was it his fault, or his biology's fault, or the fault of his background?", because these issues can never be disentangled. Instead, the only sensible question can be "what do we do from here?" -- in terms of customized sentencing, tailored rehabilition, and refined incentive structuring.''


On the neurology of morals
''Patients with medial prefrontal lesions often display irresponsible behavior, despite being intellectually unimpaired. But similar lesions occurring in early childhood can also prevent the acquisition of factual knowledge about accepted standards of moral behavior.''

I did not respond to this earlier, because I was on vacation and had very limited time and internet connectivity, so I'll make my response now.

You aren't a philosopher, and I seriously doubt that you have any comprehensive grasp of the criticism that has been directed at Pereboom. Nor have I, for that matter, but it is easy to see that he has attracted a lot of commentary pro and con. You are using him here to bolster your position, because you sense that he is an authority, but arguments from authority are known to be invalid. You need to discuss arguments rather than just cite what other people have written and take it as received wisdom.

Your quote regarding "the law" is interesting, because it makes a prediction that "the legal system will eventually be forced to shift its emphasis from retribution to a forward-looking analysis of future behavior." This is exactly the kind of nonsensical claim that free will eliminativists have been trying to make as a justification of their position. In reality, there are no signs that the legal system is being forced into any such position at all by "modern neuroscience" or ever will be. It is pure baloney--an example of scientism at its worst. The author seems to be aware of this, so he shifts to the excuse that "these issues can never be disentangled" and then goes on to ask a question that he fails to even propose an answer to: "what do we do from here?" Instead, he makes vague handwaving gestures at "customized sentencing, tailored rehabilition [sic], and refined incentive structuring'', leaving it up to the reader to make guesses about what that is supposed to mean.

I confess that I have no idea why you inserted that quote from the paywalled online article "On the neurology of morals", but I suppose that you feel the inaccessibility of its content absolves you from having to show its relevance to this discussion. We aren't talking about brain lesions or other pathological conditions. We are talking about free choices that people with healthy brains make.

 

[Jarhyn]

...
from:   Scientific Method

1. Define a question
2. Gather information and resources (observe)
3. Form an explanatory hypothesis
4. Test the hypothesis by performing an experiment and collecting data in a reproducible manner
5. Analyze the data
6. Interpret the data and draw conclusions that serve as a starting point for a new hypothesis
7. Publish results
8. Retest (frequently done by other scientists)

You are failing to properly explode the bolded portion.

You've added extra unnecessary language and hidden the important shit behind a wall of obfuscation.

Testing the hypothesis is to aim an honest attempt of disproof at it.

 

[Jarhyn]

...Nor is it a matter of me 'digging in my heels.'

In case you haven't noticed, there are two sides to this argument, compatibilism and incompatibilism. The reasons why compatibilism is inadequate to prove the proposition of free will have been explained and supported by quotes and references...

You simply prove my point in your reply. Nobody is denying that there are two sides to the argument, and your quote is nothing more than a reference to Pereboom's convoluted "manipulation argument", which has lots of critics and supporters in the literature. Like you, I don't see Pereboom seriously advocating the abolition of criminal law on the grounds that people don't actually have free will. It is really hard to argue for a conclusion that one does not take seriously, so I think that Pereboom deserves some credit for being really good at defending an absurd conclusion. Would you like references to some of his critics, or can you handle the Google search on your own?

Of course there are critics, everyone has a point of view. I have read what Pereboom's critics have to say. Just as there are critics of compatibilism.

What you say about ''advocating the abolition of criminal law on the grounds that people don't actually have free will'' indicates that you don't understand the issue.

Actions that are taken in terms of law, regulation, punishment, are made in response to human behaviour and are meant to modify or prevent undesirable activity, crime, etc.

The knowledge that there are consequences acts as a deterrent for most people, so of course nobody is suggesting abolition of the law.

Some are calling for a review.

Again;

The law
''Because most behavior is driven by brain networks we do not consciously control, the legal system will eventually be forced to shift its emphasis from retribution to a forward-looking analysis of future behavior. In the light of modern neuroscience, it no longer makes sense to ask "was it his fault, or his biology's fault, or the fault of his background?", because these issues can never be disentangled. Instead, the only sensible question can be "what do we do from here?" -- in terms of customized sentencing, tailored rehabilition, and refined incentive structuring.''


On the neurology of morals
''Patients with medial prefrontal lesions often display irresponsible behavior, despite being intellectually unimpaired. But similar lesions occurring in early childhood can also prevent the acquisition of factual knowledge about accepted standards of moral behavior.''

I did not respond to this earlier, because I was on vacation and had very limited time and internet connectivity, so I'll make my response now.

You aren't a philosopher, and I seriously doubt that you have any comprehensive grasp of the criticism that has been directed at Pereboom. Nor have I, for that matter, but it is easy to see that he has attracted a lot of commentary pro and con. You are using him here to bolster your position, because you sense that he is an authority, but arguments from authority are known to be invalid. You need to discuss arguments rather than just cite what other people have written and take it as received wisdom.

Your quote regarding "the law" is interesting, because it makes a prediction that "the legal system will eventually be forced to shift its emphasis from retribution to a forward-looking analysis of future behavior." This is exactly the kind of nonsensical claim that free will eliminativists have been trying to make as a justification of their position. In reality, there are no signs that the legal system is being forced into any such position at all by "modern neuroscience" or ever will be. It is pure baloney--an example of scientism at its worst. The author seems to be aware of this, so he shifts to the excuse that "these issues can never be disentangled" and then goes on to ask a question that he fails to even propose an answer to: "what do we do from here?" Instead, he makes vague handwaving gestures at "customized sentencing, tailored rehabilition [sic], and refined incentive structuring'', leaving it up to the reader to make guesses about what that is supposed to mean.

I confess that I have no idea why you inserted that quote from the paywalled online article "On the neurology of morals", but I suppose that you feel the inaccessibility of its content absolves you from having to show its relevance to this discussion. We aren't talking about brain lesions or other pathological conditions. We are talking about free choices that people with healthy brains make.

Even people.with brain lesions and disconnected hemispheres have choices that are made from their own reference frame, their own locus, even if not all choices made by the meat they inhabit are made by that single locus; someone might be forced to play a two player game and not have awareness of the reasoning of player two, with player two not having access to communicative potential.

These are still choices, made freely by the localities that determine them.