Compatibilism: What's that About?

[Jarhyn]

What I'm getting at is that if, as you seem to imply in your reply to DBT (post #916), free will is reliant on local stochastic (non-deterministic?) systems then the free will you're talking about is not compatibilist free will.

So, the wording I use around this is at least intended and supposed to be something very precise and sharp.

I'm sure it was but I'm afraid it meant little to me!

Imagine a system, as I described before:

A system where I supply a mathematical seed, and a number of AI initialized with iterations of that seed for their network weights, and then every iteration select as winners for reproductions and mutations those which most successfully navigate a maze, where their behavior may intersect physically. The losers stop existing in future frames as such, and get rewritten by the winners.

This system contains no randomness in the process of determining next state.

This looks deterministic to me. I'll leave it there.

Thanks for your efforts.

"It satisfies the core property of "deterministic", because the RNG is a pseudorandom process, a thing of chaos."

Of course it's deterministic. It's defined and developed as such, specifically to satisfy that definition.

The issue is that it contains locally stochastic elements.

This is the thing I say means something very specific: it means that deterministic systems are capable of having and representing, in their graph, all the properties of stochastic systems.

if I say "B has a meaningful property of P, and things with property A may contain objects which meaningfully have property B with all meaningful properties of B, then A may have a meaningful property P."

There is unknowable and unreconcilable chaos even that in the fully deterministic system, and because of the inability to so model recursively, it becomes stochastic from that context, the local one to the ones in the race.

Some things they will model, namely the laws of motion in their environment. Depending on how much I give them, they may even model the laws of their universe entirely, down to memory quanta!

They might debate whether the RNG is random or pseudorandom, on the ethics of finishing the race knowing half of them will die, and even if they discover that it is all deterministic they will still know that they are blind to what it would take for them to determine anything with that knowledge in anything but a chaotic efficient competition. It just makes them more capable of another layer of examining whose will is the freest, whose model draws them.

But they won't be able to escape their own inability to model the whole of their time and space with them in it, too. They are incapable of being a perfect systemic model and are themselves "locally stochastic".

From my perspective, all events are causally deterministic, but may be practically impossible to predict. That's why we have concepts like random and chaotic, to identify unpredictability except through probabilities. The causation is reliable, but the prediction is not.

No, from your perspective you BELIEVE all events are causally Deterministic.

In reality fully stochastic systems are just "deterministic systems with one-time-pad feeding in" "from your perspective", if that's the way you want to play it.

you wish to BELIEVE (and for now it is a belief, though one with some decent evidence) that the quantum resolution pathways are in fixed sequence.

Even were you right, however, you being what you are with a universe of first causes forever affecting you RANDOMLY! and UNPREDICTABLY! and a limit of systemic complexity which prevents you from being anything better than a stochastic model: there are necessarily unknowns in your model that prevent deterministic calculation and force you into statistical modeling. Even were the universe deterministic, and it's unclear whether it is or not, human survival is a subcontext that is locally stochastic, and this local property existing is enough to say "free will exists as a (local property contextual to human survival)".

 

[fromderinside]

I don't say physics is an application of math. I say physics is described in operations which are material. Math, logic, Detection theory, Game theory are applications of logic used to model and describe that which may objective, subjective, material or some combination of those. Physics is described by material operations where various logic systems are applied.

The great English philosophers Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead attempted to systematize mathematics but failed. The failure is described by Godel as follows:

"It is to be regretted that this first comprehensive and thorough-going presentation of a mathematical logic and the derivation of mathematics from it [is] so greatly lacking in formal precision in the foundations (contained in *1-*21 of Principia) that it represents in this respect a considerable step backwards as compared with Frege. What is missing, above all, is a precise statement of the syntax of the formalism. Syntactical considerations are omitted even in cases where they are necessary for the cogency of the proofs . . . The matter is especially doubtful for the rule of substitution and of replacing defined symbols by their definiens . . . it is chiefly the rule of substitution which would have to be proved"

In my study of physics I found most mathematics was invented to solve particular physical problems. So your misunderstanding about physics may lie there.

We don't disagree except on the point that science is based upon systematically described and verified material operations.

 

[The AntiChris]

Even were the universe deterministic, and it's unclear whether it is or not, human survival is a subcontext that is locally stochastic, and this local property existing is enough to say "free will exists as a (local property contextual to human survival)".

I'm afraid this just muddies the water. I find it hard to reconcile what you have said with what Marvin has been saying and what I understand by compatibilist free will.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

No, from your perspective you BELIEVE all events are causally Deterministic.

Yes, determinism is a belief, thus the little "-ism" at the end. The notion that the world operates through multiple reliable causal mechanisms is what drives our scientific curiosity to discover the causes of events that affect our lives.

Knowledge of the causes gives us some control over those events. The more reliable the cause the more able we are to cope with things, like covid-19. The random variations make our job more difficult, requiring us to come up with new vaccines.

In reality fully stochastic systems are just "deterministic systems with one-time-pad feeding in" "from your perspective", if that's the way you want to play it.

Well, I can't play it that way because I have no clue what "one-time-pad feeding in" means. You're losing me with the tech-speak.

you wish to BELIEVE (and for now it is a belief, though one with some decent evidence) that the quantum resolution pathways are in fixed sequence.

My view is that matter organized differently tends to behave according to unique rules that apply to that level. Quantum objects likely behave reliably but according to rules that we have yet to understand. Inanimate objects behave reliably according to physical rules. Living organisms behave reliably according to biological rules. Intelligent species behave reliably according to the rules of rational thought.

Even were you right, however, you being what you are with a universe of first causes forever affecting you RANDOMLY! and UNPREDICTABLY! and a limit of systemic complexity which prevents you from being anything better than a stochastic model:

Yeah, but in a deterministic world, if I practice, I can learn to reliably hit the nail rather than my thumb. In the absence of reliable causation, there's no telling what I'll hit.

there are necessarily unknowns in your model that prevent deterministic calculation and force you into statistical modeling. Even were the universe deterministic, and it's unclear whether it is or not, human survival is a subcontext that is locally stochastic, and this local property existing is enough to say "free will exists as a (local property contextual to human survival)".

Sure. Lots of stuff we don't know, and tons more stuff that I don't know. But most people understand the notion of cause and effect, and hope that the world will behave reliably, and that gravity will not randomly decide to start pushing things instead of pulling them.

And most people observe themselves and others deciding for themselves what they will do.

So, us ordinary folk find no conflict between these two objective observations.

 

[DBT]

Your wording doesn't contradict anything I have said, nor the definition given in Stanford.

Yes it does. The universe is apparently stochastic.

Whether the universe is stochastic has bearing on this debate, which is about free will in a deterministic universe

No, it really doesn't because deterministic systems may contain locally stochastic systems.

Whether deterministic systems contain stochastic systems or not is irrelevant to compatibilism, which argues that free will is compatible with determinism, or to incompatibilism, which argues that free will is not compatible with determinism. You are wandering off the track to a different subject

If stochastic systems may have local free will then a deterministic system with a locally stochastic system may have the describable property of free will, if a stochastic system may have free will.

YOU want to discuss this on the level of an academic, you have to approach the topic academically.

Again, stochastic systems are not the point of contention here. QM is not the issue here. The issue is the compatibility of free will and determinism.

 

[DBT]

Your wording doesn't contradict anything I have said, nor the definition given in Stanford.

Yes it does. The universe is apparently stochastic.

Whether the universe is stochastic has bearing on this debate, which is about free will in a deterministic universe

No, it really doesn't because deterministic systems may contain locally stochastic systems.

If stochastic systems may have local free will then a deterministic system with a locally stochastic system may have the describable property of free will, if a stochastic system may have free will.

So it's very much part of the topic.

This is, ultimately, why I find hard determinists to be exercising on obtuseness, I think.

Admittedly I didn't see it until this thread, and I've been tossing around these ideas (essentially having the same conversation as you lot have been having with each other and me, but with myself) for the last 6 years.

Whether the universe is stochastic has bearing on this debate, which is about free will in a deterministic universe

No, it really doesn't because deterministic systems may contain locally stochastic systems.

I find this confusing. Are these "stochastic systems" deterministic?

Stochastic and deterministic as "descriptors of systems" are a thing of math.

The world is composed of objects and events and their relationships that can be represented mathematically, π, E=mc2, planetary orbits, etc, etc... but the argument here is still in regard to the nature of free will and its compatibility with determinism. BTW, some argue that QM is a form of determinism.

 

[DBT]

P1: A freely chosen will is when someone chooses for themselves what they will do, while free of coercion and other forms of undue influence.
P2: A world is deterministic if every event is reliably caused by prior events.
P3: A freely chosen will is reliably caused by the person's own goals, reasons, or interests (with their prior causes).
P4: An unfree choice is reliably caused by coercion or undue influence (with their prior causes).
C: Therefore, the notion of a freely chosen will (and its opposite) is still meaningful within a fully deterministic world.

If determinism allows any action to be taken, it's not determinism. The word 'determined' means final. Final as in fixed. Finalized or fixed by prior states of the world.

That would seem to be a logical fact, but it is not a meaningful nor a relevant fact.

To say that the Big Bang finalized all future events suggests that it is was the Big Bang that pointed the gun at the bank clerk and insisted that she hand over the money. Or that it was the Big Bang that landed the Apollo rockets on the Moon. Or that It is was the Big Bang that bombed our naval fleet at Pearl Harbor. Or that the Big Bang chose my breakfast for me.

The Big Bang, if determinism is true, had the necessary elements for everything that followed, from Big Bang to us typing on our keyboards arguing over free will....just as you said; ''All of these events, including my choices, were causally necessary from any prior point in time. And they all proceeded without deviation from the Big Bang to this moment.'' - Marvin Edwards.

And yet, the Big Bang played no meaningful or relevant role in any of those events.

Meaning. What's that about?
Relevance. What's that about?

Initial conditions -time t - plus natural law, and here we are; events proceeding naturally (as if "fixed as a matter of natural law") and reliably ("without deviation").

You can apply time t to any point in time and conditions will follow from the state of the system that point in time.

Imagining building a bridge doesn't appear in a vacuum. Conditions in the world in relation to human needs, wants and engineering skills brings forth the idea of building a bridge, and if the need is strong enough, the impetus to put imagination into action.

Countless elements and events went into imagining building a bridge and carrying it out.

Really? I thought you said that the Big Bang already finalized the bridge. If it were finalized, by the Big Bang, then nothing more needed to be done. Right?

The process must unfold as determined. Imagining building a bridge must precede planning the construction, followed by acquiring the necessary materials and manpower to build the bridge.

The brain of each and every diner acquires information from the menu, which is processed (brain state, proclivities, etc), conscious deliberation generated and related action initiated, you choose Lobster on that occasion. The only possible result on that occasion.
Information processing, not free will.

Why would information processing be meaningful or relevant if the choice were fixed and finalized by the Big Bang? "Final" does mean final, right? Nothing else left to be done, right?

The big bang provided the energy, matter/energy, star and planetary formation, etc, to get the process started. Solar energy, complex chemistry, the right conditions on Earth, the evolution of life, numerous extinction events, ice ages, and here we are. Did we have any control over the process? None. Did we choose to be here? Did we choose our biology and brain capacity?

Then I should expect natural law to pay for my dinner. What? That doesn't work?
And how about the bank robbery caused by natural law. Why aren't the police arresting and jailing natural law?

Oh. So we don't hold the past and the laws of nature responsible for their works? Hardly seems fair.

You know that's not how the world works.

It is not you who choice, but the system, the world, that brings you to that location and precisely that action in relation to that menu.

Then tell the waiter to bill the system or bill the world. If they are responsible for my ordering the lobster dinner then they should pay the bill.

But conscious self is not doing it. The distinction being that conscious self in not in control, that it's specifically the brain that is generating the experience of self-awareness and conscious control, an illusion that is exposed whenever things go wrong with the brain.

Again. It makes no difference whether conscious self is an illusion or not. It is empirically the brain, specifically my brain, that chose to order the lobster dinner. And it must now pay the bill.

And it's still a matter of information processing rather than free will. What we can or can't do comes down to the architecture and state and condition of our brain, not our will, not 'free will.''

''Consciousness, as William James pointed out, is not a thing, but a process or stream that is changing on a time scale of fractions of seconds (1). As he emphasized, a fundamental aspect of the stream of consciousness is that it is highly unified or integrated. Integration is a property shared by every conscious experience irrespective of its specific content: Each conscious state comprises a single "scene" that cannot be decomposed into independent components (5). Integration is best appreciated by considering the impossibility of conceiving of a conscious scene that is not integrated, that is, one which is not experienced from a single point of view.

A striking demonstration is given by split-brain patients performing a spatial memory task in which two independent sequences of visuospatial positions were presented, one to the left and one to the right hemisphere. In these patients, each hemisphere perceived a separate, simple visual problem and the subjects were able to solve the double task well. Normal subjects could not treat the two independent visual sequences as independent, parallel tasks. Instead, they combined the visual information into a single conscious scene and into a single, large problem that was much more difficult to solve.''

How the brain functions, how it manages to make choices from the menu, is irrelevant to the issue of whether or not it actually makes choices. The fact is that the brain actually does make choices, whether or not to order the lobster, and whether or not to rob a bank. In both cases it will be held responsible for its deliberate actions.

How our brain produces outcomes is relevant to the question of free will, considering that what the brain does is not willed. It's the state of the system in the moment of decision making that determines the selection.

Because the selection is determined by elements beyond control or alteration - no possible alternate action - the choice made is fixed by brain state and antecedents.

Neither the past nor the laws of nature will be held responsible, because they cannot be corrected. They are as they are, and there's nothing we can do about it.

But the guy who ordered the lobster can be required to pay for the lobster. And the guy who robbed the bank can be placed in a correctional facility.

By the given definition of determinism, past conditions are absolutely responsible for current conditions and current conditions are absolutely responsible for future conditions.

 

[Jarhyn]

Yes, determinism is a belief, thus the little "-ism"

Yes, the belief that the universe is a system definable and describable by math and is subject as a system to a specific and well defined property within math "deterministic".

Knowledge of the causes gives us some control over those events

The issue is that there is no possible knowledge of certain "reasons of cause".

We know the "reason of cause" for instance when a bunch of electrons are pumping through a wire, whereas the "reason of cause" for the resolution of certain events, quantum ones, is absolutely random and hidden. It can it be modeled because it is apparently unavailable, a piece of information kept secret from "first cause" to the instant it is revealed.

Regardless of whether you want to declare that as deterministic globally (and it may be) it still MUST be modeled and handled inside, and this must be done stochastically. It creates a stochastic context inside the deterministic one, and allows the deterministic system to house properties of stochastic systems.

Well, I can't play it that way because I have no clue what "one-time-pad feeding in" means. You're losing me with the tech-speak.

Then google it. Like Elixer has been explaining to Learner, if you don't understand you have to learn more about determinism, probabilistics, chaos, and randomness if you wish to discuss any of this sensibly.

A one-time-pad is a stack of numbers just-so. Every time a number is used by the system, the number on top of the pad is thrown away and the next number is used. They are created with intersections of various sources of chaos and/or randomness and whatever generated the randomness of the quantum sequence seems rather resistant to prediction.

Oftentimes this is used in cryptography: identical pads are given to both folks, the pad tells them how to modify each letter completely randomly ((pattern) XOR (randomness) is indistinguishable from (randomness)). Then the only way to find the message again in the void is to spew exactly the same randomness into the XOR function.

view is that matter

So, this gets back to something FDI is trying to say that doesn't really work the way he is saying it or where or why: matter will do what it does and your view matters very little. If you want to say what matter does at some level to the people here, you will have to describe the principle by which it happens and a test.

We, in discussing how the universe is described by math, do not get to just assume shit.

Yeah, but in a deterministic world, if I practice, I can learn to reliably hit the nail rather than my thumb. In the absence of reliable causation, there's no telling what I'll hit.

Look at the fully random universe of "chutes and ladders". It has fixed properties of physics and "completely probabilistic" resolution of events. In this manner from the inside "hard determinism without decision" is actually the model by which the actors in this world function.

It's a strange paradox insofar as the only way to respond to events is "it was inevitable!"

This comes down to Game Theory. I would strongly recommend looking up YouTube videos on basic mathematical game theory, and then picking up The Foundations of Mathematics by Ian Stewart. If you cannot follow along on that book, the same author has a number of textbooks as well at various levels of math and they're all pretty useful.

The game theory of the game, for any game for which the players are entirely contained in the game (universe), must contain stochastic prediction, as the system cannot contain a perfect implementation of itself. This is a global property to the context of the players. This is true even in fully deterministic environments.

I strongly recommend coming back through this thread on my posts once you've taken the prerequisites OR contact me in private and I can give you a direct handle.

I teach people I like for free.

 

[Jarhyn]

Whether deterministic systems contain stochastic systems or not is irrelevant to compatibilism

No, it isn't. See the discussion I'm having with Marvin. I'm not having this same fucking conversation between two different people.

 

[Jarhyn]

I don't say physics is an application of math.

I, and most actual theoretical physicists, say physics is an application of math.

If you don't understand why, you don't understand what math is and what physics is.

Math was, once upon a time some 3 or 4 billion years ago, invented by carbon chemistry for which modeling more/less had survival value.

Since then, at some point in time, we discovered all those rules we used to describe physical properties had a set of shared principles that they all functioned around, or probably did at any rate.

Some work was done on that, and so we arrived at set theory. All that other math after and now undergirded by set theory is not an invention or creation, it's merely an implication of the axioms of that system of set theory. It is a "discovery" of math and a "discovery of how to use math to describe a thing".

Read The Foundations of Mathematics by Ian Stewart, at least through 27%, and pick a thread. I'm not going to explain this same damn thing to two people across two threads.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

P1: A freely chosen will is when someone chooses for themselves what they will do, while free of coercion and other forms of undue influence.
P2: A world is deterministic if every event is reliably caused by prior events.
P3: A freely chosen will is reliably caused by the person's own goals, reasons, or interests (with their prior causes).
P4: An unfree choice is reliably caused by coercion or undue influence (with their prior causes).
C: Therefore, the notion of a freely chosen will (and its opposite) is still meaningful within a fully deterministic world.

The Big Bang, if determinism is true, had the necessary elements for everything that followed, from Big Bang to us typing on our keyboards arguing over free will....just as you said.

And yet, the Big Bang itself plays no meaningful or relevant role in any human events.

A meaningful cause efficiently explains why something happened.
A relevant cause is something we can actually do something about.

If the Big Bang were a meaningful cause of my comments, then why do you address your responses to me? You obviously believe that I am the meaningful cause of my comments.

And you obviously know that there is nothing you can do about the Big Bang, so your only hope of effecting change in my comments is to address your comments to me.

Face it, the Big Bang is not a meaningful or relevant cause of your comments or mine.

Initial conditions -time t - plus natural law, and here we are; events proceeding naturally (as if "fixed as a matter of natural law") and reliably ("without deviation").

You can apply time t to any point in time and conditions will follow from the state of the system that point in time.

Yep. Here I am and here you are. Both products of the transformation over time of the stuff of the Big Bang into human beings capable of choosing for themselves what they will have from the restaurant menu.

Choosing "what will happen next" is something that the Big Bang was unable to do. It was a brainless, inanimate object. It had no means of deliberate control, and no biological motivations to pursue any goals.

There is nothing in the universe exercising deliberate control prior to intelligent species.

The Big Bang showed up 13.77 billion years ago, but purposeful and deliberate control of behavior did not show up in the universe for the first 10 billion years. It took that long for the constant shuffling of matter to organize itself into single celled organisms.

The process must unfold as determined. Imagining building a bridge must precede planning the construction, followed by acquiring the necessary materials and manpower to build the bridge.

But the Big Bang had no brain, so it could not imagine a future and make a plan for bringing it about. That's something that only intelligent species are capable of doing.

We actually get to choose what the waiter will bring us for dinner, from a literal menu of alternate possibilities.

The big bang provided the energy, matter/energy, star and planetary formation, etc, to get the process started. Solar energy, complex chemistry, the right conditions on Earth, the evolution of life, numerous extinction events, ice ages, and here we are.

The Big Bang didn't do anything other than explosively expel the pent up matter in the super condensed black hole out into empty space. It was a single event at a given point in time, about 13.77 billion years ago.

Did we have any control over the process? None.

And guess what, the Big Bang had no control over the process either.

Did we choose to be here? Did we choose our biology and brain capacity?

Nope. But all of the things that we didn't choose do not prevent us from choosing what we will have for dinner from a menu of alternate possibilities.

And it's still a matter of information processing rather than free will.

Choosing IS the information processing that determines our deliberate will, our specific intent to do something, for example, telling the waiter, "I will have the lobster dinner, please".

What we can or can't do comes down to the architecture and state and condition of our brain, not our will, not 'free will.'

You've jumbled things badly. The brain's architecture provides the hardware. The brain's events perform the choosing. The choosing determines the intent. The intent motivates and directs the body's subsequent action of saying to the waiter, "I will have the lobster dinner, please".

The question of "free" will is whether that brain is free to conduct this choosing process itself, or whether some other brain is pointing a gun at it and forcing its own choice upon the victim brain, or whether the brain is a victim of injury or illness that impairs its normal ability to choose.

Free will is when the person's own brain is free to choose for itself what the person will do, without coercion or other forms of undue influence.

Because the selection is determined by elements beyond control or alteration - no possible alternate action - the choice made is fixed by brain state and antecedents.

The brain process that fixes the choice is called "choosing". Why do you keep trying to hide choosing from us with alternate technical descriptions that all amount to choosing?

By the given definition of determinism, past conditions are absolutely responsible for current conditions and current conditions are absolutely responsible for future conditions.

Well, no. We've been over this repeatedly. The Big Bang was in fact "a past condition". Yet it is never held responsible for the lobster I ordered. And it is never held responsible for the robber holding up the convenience store.

Whether a person is free to decide for themselves what they will do, or instead coerced or unduly influenced into a choice they would not normally choose, is a meaningful and relevant issue in human affairs, especially when assigning moral or legal responsibility for their actions.

And this distinction is still meaningful within a deterministic view of the universe.

The argument for compatibilism holds.

 

[Jarhyn]

It can it be modeled b

*Cannot.

Even were the universe deterministic, and it's unclear whether it is or not, human survival is a subcontext that is locally stochastic, and this local property existing is enough to say "free will exists as a (local property contextual to human survival)".

I'm afraid this just muddies the water. I find it hard to reconcile what you have said with what Marvin has been saying and what I understand by compatibilist free will.

It muddles the water as much as discussing set theory in elementary school addition class.

It's just that the elementary school addition class wants to discuss how to prove 2+2=4, or WHY 2+2=4, and you don't get there until like, year 3 of college at least.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

Yes, determinism is a belief, thus the little "-ism"

Yes, the belief that the universe is a system definable and describable by math and is subject as a system to a specific and well defined property within math "deterministic".

Knowledge of the causes gives us some control over those events

The issue is that there is no possible knowledge of certain "reasons of cause".

We know the "reason of cause" for instance when a bunch of electrons are pumping through a wire, whereas the "reason of cause" for the resolution of certain events, quantum ones, is absolutely random and hidden. It can it be modeled because it is apparently unavailable, a piece of information kept secret from "first cause" to the instant it is revealed.

Regardless of whether you want to declare that as deterministic globally (and it may be) it still MUST be modeled and handled inside, and this must be done stochastically. It creates a stochastic context inside the deterministic one, and allows the deterministic system to house properties of stochastic systems.

Well, I can't play it that way because I have no clue what "one-time-pad feeding in" means. You're losing me with the tech-speak.

Then google it. Like Elixer has been explaining to Learner, if you don't understand you have to learn more about determinism, probabilistics, chaos, and randomness if you wish to discuss any of this sensibly.

A one-time-pad is a stack of numbers just-so. Every time a number is used by the system, the number on top of the pad is thrown away and the next number is used. They are created with intersections of various sources of chaos and/or randomness and whatever generated the randomness of the quantum sequence seems rather resistant to prediction.

Oftentimes this is used in cryptography: identical pads are given to both folks, the pad tells them how to modify each letter completely randomly ((pattern) XOR (randomness) is indistinguishable from (randomness)). Then the only way to find the message again in the void is to spew exactly the same randomness into the XOR function.

view is that matter

So, this gets back to something FDI is trying to say that doesn't really work the way he is saying it or where or why: matter will do what it does and your view matters very little. If you want to say what matter does at some level to the people here, you will have to describe the principle by which it happens and a test.

We, in discussing how the universe is described by math, do not get to just assume shit.

Yeah, but in a deterministic world, if I practice, I can learn to reliably hit the nail rather than my thumb. In the absence of reliable causation, there's no telling what I'll hit.

Look at the fully random universe of "chutes and ladders". It has fixed properties of physics and "completely probabilistic" resolution of events. In this manner from the inside "hard determinism without decision" is actually the model by which the actors in this world function.

It's a strange paradox insofar as the only way to respond to events is "it was inevitable!"

This comes down to Game Theory. I would strongly recommend looking up YouTube videos on basic mathematical game theory, and then picking up The Foundations of Mathematics by Ian Stewart. If you cannot follow along on that book, the same author has a number of textbooks as well at various levels of math and they're all pretty useful.

The game theory of the game, for any game for which the players are entirely contained in the game (universe), must contain stochastic prediction, as the system cannot contain a perfect implementation of itself. This is a global property to the context of the players. This is true even in fully deterministic environments.

I strongly recommend coming back through this thread on my posts once you've taken the prerequisites OR contact me in private and I can give you a direct handle.

I teach people I like for free.

My goal is to communicate the problem and the solution without having to send people off to become experts in quantum mechanics or game theory or philosophy or neuroscience or anything other than common sense. Everyone already has the tools they need to understand what I am saying. After all, I solved the problem as a teenager in the public library. The same key I discovered there unlocks all else.

 

[Jarhyn]

Yes, determinism is a belief, thus the little "-ism"

Yes, the belief that the universe is a system definable and describable by math and is subject as a system to a specific and well defined property within math "deterministic".

Knowledge of the causes gives us some control over those events

The issue is that there is no possible knowledge of certain "reasons of cause".

We know the "reason of cause" for instance when a bunch of electrons are pumping through a wire, whereas the "reason of cause" for the resolution of certain events, quantum ones, is absolutely random and hidden. It can it be modeled because it is apparently unavailable, a piece of information kept secret from "first cause" to the instant it is revealed.

Regardless of whether you want to declare that as deterministic globally (and it may be) it still MUST be modeled and handled inside, and this must be done stochastically. It creates a stochastic context inside the deterministic one, and allows the deterministic system to house properties of stochastic systems.

Well, I can't play it that way because I have no clue what "one-time-pad feeding in" means. You're losing me with the tech-speak.

Then google it. Like Elixer has been explaining to Learner, if you don't understand you have to learn more about determinism, probabilistics, chaos, and randomness if you wish to discuss any of this sensibly.

A one-time-pad is a stack of numbers just-so. Every time a number is used by the system, the number on top of the pad is thrown away and the next number is used. They are created with intersections of various sources of chaos and/or randomness and whatever generated the randomness of the quantum sequence seems rather resistant to prediction.

Oftentimes this is used in cryptography: identical pads are given to both folks, the pad tells them how to modify each letter completely randomly ((pattern) XOR (randomness) is indistinguishable from (randomness)). Then the only way to find the message again in the void is to spew exactly the same randomness into the XOR function.

view is that matter

So, this gets back to something FDI is trying to say that doesn't really work the way he is saying it or where or why: matter will do what it does and your view matters very little. If you want to say what matter does at some level to the people here, you will have to describe the principle by which it happens and a test.

We, in discussing how the universe is described by math, do not get to just assume shit.

Yeah, but in a deterministic world, if I practice, I can learn to reliably hit the nail rather than my thumb. In the absence of reliable causation, there's no telling what I'll hit.

Look at the fully random universe of "chutes and ladders". It has fixed properties of physics and "completely probabilistic" resolution of events. In this manner from the inside "hard determinism without decision" is actually the model by which the actors in this world function.

It's a strange paradox insofar as the only way to respond to events is "it was inevitable!"

This comes down to Game Theory. I would strongly recommend looking up YouTube videos on basic mathematical game theory, and then picking up The Foundations of Mathematics by Ian Stewart. If you cannot follow along on that book, the same author has a number of textbooks as well at various levels of math and they're all pretty useful.

The game theory of the game, for any game for which the players are entirely contained in the game (universe), must contain stochastic prediction, as the system cannot contain a perfect implementation of itself. This is a global property to the context of the players. This is true even in fully deterministic environments.

I strongly recommend coming back through this thread on my posts once you've taken the prerequisites OR contact me in private and I can give you a direct handle.

I teach people I like for free.

My goal is to communicate the problem and the solution without having to send people off to become experts in quantum mechanics or game theory or philosophy or neuroscience or anything other than common sense. Everyone already has the tools they need to understand what I am saying. After all, I solved the problem as a teenager in the public library. The same key I discovered there unlocks all else.

Well, you won't do that as regards DBT or FDI, and at best you're going to get wishy-washy converts if it's based on a wishy-washy understanding of what is happening on a more set theoretic level.

If you don't want to prove that your hypothesis is true, really do the work for it and understand it to a mechanical level of precision, you won't be able to say for sure why it is true, and then folks like DBT and FDI will keep on pinning false properties on determinism with hand-waving and you won't have the ammunition nor understanding to just prove it is religious nonsense and fatalism just without the word "god" involved.

 

[fromderinside]

I don't say physics is an application of math.

I, and most actual theoretical physicists, say physics is an application of math.

If you don't understand why, you don't understand what math is and what physics is.

Math was, once upon a time some 3 or 4 billion years ago, invented by carbon chemistry for which modeling more/less had survival value.

Since then, at some point in time, we discovered all those rules we used to describe physical properties had a set of shared principles that they all functioned around, or probably did at any rate.

Some work was done on that, and so we arrived at set theory. All that other math after and now undergirded by set theory is not an invention or creation, it's merely an implication of the axioms of that system of set theory. It is a "discovery" of math and a "discovery of how to use math to describe a thing".

Read The Foundations of Mathematics by Ian Stewart, at least through 27%, and pick a thread. I'm not going to explain this same damn thing to two people across two threads.

Maybe its because I was a practicing psychophysicist who used mathematics and statistics in my studies of the relation between physical media and animal behavior. I understand the links between Math and Physics are strong, especially for theorists.

Still, I stand by my operationalist view of the relation between model and material in science.

 

[Jarhyn]

I don't say physics is an application of math.

I, and most actual theoretical physicists, say physics is an application of math.

If you don't understand why, you don't understand what math is and what physics is.

Math was, once upon a time some 3 or 4 billion years ago, invented by carbon chemistry for which modeling more/less had survival value.

Since then, at some point in time, we discovered all those rules we used to describe physical properties had a set of shared principles that they all functioned around, or probably did at any rate.

Some work was done on that, and so we arrived at set theory. All that other math after and now undergirded by set theory is not an invention or creation, it's merely an implication of the axioms of that system of set theory. It is a "discovery" of math and a "discovery of how to use math to describe a thing".

Read The Foundations of Mathematics by Ian Stewart, at least through 27%, and pick a thread. I'm not going to explain this same damn thing to two people across two threads.

Maybe its because I was a practicing psychophysicist who used mathematics and statistics in my studies of the relation between physical media and animal behavior. I understand the links between Math and Physics are strong, especially for theorists.

Still, I stand by my operationalist view of the relation between model and material in science.

And I will throw your "operationalist" view in the garbage if you wish to use it inappropriately to apply a mathematical property across a physical thing that is perfectly described by math and not bother to actually prove in the domain these things are defined in that they lack the ability to express a particular shape of property within their graphs.

You don't get to say "physics carries is property of math" without first standing on "physics is described this way by math sufficiently to all observations, and thus this property based on the description via math."

But then your second problem is you wish to say "deterministic system, therefore no free will" without actually establishing that deterministic systems cannot host free will.

And if it's not a necessary property of determinism such that such systems would be incapable of hosting free will within the system, then you cannot say "determinism, thus no free will".

At best you would have to prove Determinsm, and also no free will.

Of course, your definition of "free will" is entirely incoherent in any system. We just declare that YOUR definition of "free will" is garbage because it is incapable of actually speaking to the thing people mean when they utter free will, and that this property is an actual, demonstrable graph property within a system.

 

[DBT]

Whether deterministic systems contain stochastic systems or not is irrelevant to compatibilism

No, it isn't. See the discussion I'm having with Marvin. I'm not having this same fucking conversation between two different people.

What you do is of no concern to me. I only have so much time to spare. I can't read everyone's conversation.

 

[DBT]

Yes, determinism is a belief, thus the little "-ism"

Yes, the belief that the universe is a system definable and describable by math and is subject as a system to a specific and well defined property within math "deterministic".

Knowledge of the causes gives us some control over those events

The issue is that there is no possible knowledge of certain "reasons of cause".

We know the "reason of cause" for instance when a bunch of electrons are pumping through a wire, whereas the "reason of cause" for the resolution of certain events, quantum ones, is absolutely random and hidden. It can it be modeled because it is apparently unavailable, a piece of information kept secret from "first cause" to the instant it is revealed.

Regardless of whether you want to declare that as deterministic globally (and it may be) it still MUST be modeled and handled inside, and this must be done stochastically. It creates a stochastic context inside the deterministic one, and allows the deterministic system to house properties of stochastic systems.

Well, I can't play it that way because I have no clue what "one-time-pad feeding in" means. You're losing me with the tech-speak.

Then google it. Like Elixer has been explaining to Learner, if you don't understand you have to learn more about determinism, probabilistics, chaos, and randomness if you wish to discuss any of this sensibly.

A one-time-pad is a stack of numbers just-so. Every time a number is used by the system, the number on top of the pad is thrown away and the next number is used. They are created with intersections of various sources of chaos and/or randomness and whatever generated the randomness of the quantum sequence seems rather resistant to prediction.

Oftentimes this is used in cryptography: identical pads are given to both folks, the pad tells them how to modify each letter completely randomly ((pattern) XOR (randomness) is indistinguishable from (randomness)). Then the only way to find the message again in the void is to spew exactly the same randomness into the XOR function.

view is that matter

So, this gets back to something FDI is trying to say that doesn't really work the way he is saying it or where or why: matter will do what it does and your view matters very little. If you want to say what matter does at some level to the people here, you will have to describe the principle by which it happens and a test.

We, in discussing how the universe is described by math, do not get to just assume shit.

Yeah, but in a deterministic world, if I practice, I can learn to reliably hit the nail rather than my thumb. In the absence of reliable causation, there's no telling what I'll hit.

Look at the fully random universe of "chutes and ladders". It has fixed properties of physics and "completely probabilistic" resolution of events. In this manner from the inside "hard determinism without decision" is actually the model by which the actors in this world function.

It's a strange paradox insofar as the only way to respond to events is "it was inevitable!"

This comes down to Game Theory. I would strongly recommend looking up YouTube videos on basic mathematical game theory, and then picking up The Foundations of Mathematics by Ian Stewart. If you cannot follow along on that book, the same author has a number of textbooks as well at various levels of math and they're all pretty useful.

The game theory of the game, for any game for which the players are entirely contained in the game (universe), must contain stochastic prediction, as the system cannot contain a perfect implementation of itself. This is a global property to the context of the players. This is true even in fully deterministic environments.

I strongly recommend coming back through this thread on my posts once you've taken the prerequisites OR contact me in private and I can give you a direct handle.

I teach people I like for free.

My goal is to communicate the problem and the solution without having to send people off to become experts in quantum mechanics or game theory or philosophy or neuroscience or anything other than common sense. Everyone already has the tools they need to understand what I am saying. After all, I solved the problem as a teenager in the public library. The same key I discovered there unlocks all else.

Well, you won't do that as regards DBT or FDI, and at best you're going to get wishy-washy converts if it's based on a wishy-washy understanding of what is happening on a more set theoretic level.

If you don't want to prove that your hypothesis is true, really do the work for it and understand it to a mechanical level of precision, you won't be able to say for sure why it is true, and then folks like DBT and FDI will keep on pinning false properties on determinism with hand-waving and you won't have the ammunition nor understanding to just prove it is religious nonsense and fatalism just without the word "god" involved.

False. I'm not pinning false properties onto determinism. The definition of determinism that I work with - from Stanford - is essentially no different from the definition of determinism you gave.


Nor is that essentially different to the definition given by Marvin Edwards; ''Determinism means that events will proceed naturally (as if "fixed as a matter of natural law") and reliably ("without deviation").


Jarhyn - A deterministic system is a system in which no randomness is involved in the development of future states of the system.

Stanford - Determinism: The world is governed by (or is under the sway of) determinism if and only if, given a specified way things are at a time t, the way things go thereafter is fixed as a matter of natural law.

Or perhaps you don't understand the implications of ''no randomness is involved in the development of future states of the system?''

 

[fromderinside]

I don't say physics is an application of math.
I, and most actual theoretical physicists, say physics is an application of math.

If you don't understand why, you don't understand what math is and what physics is.

You don't get to say "physics carries is property of math" without first standing on "physics is described this way by math sufficiently to all observations, and thus this property based on the description via math."

What is Physics and Why is it Important?

Physics is the science of nature, or that which pertains to natural objects, which deals with the laws and properties of matter and the forces which act upon them.

www.universalclass.com

Physics. The science in which matter and energy are studied both separately and in combination with one another.

And a more detailed working definition of physics may be: The science of nature, or that which pertains to natural objects, which deals with the laws and properties of matter and the forces which act upon them. Quite often, physics concentrates upon the forces having an impact upon matter, that is, gravitation, heat, light, magnetism, electricity, and others.

B. Physics. Orientation

Because physics utilizes elements of other branches of sciences, biology and chemistry for example, it has the reputation of being more complicated than other sciences.

Physics, as opposed to natural philosophy (with which it was grouped until the 19th century), relies upon scientific methods in order to describe the natural world.

...

C. Physics and Mathematics

As a whole, physics is closely related to mathematics, for it provides the logical structure in which physical laws may be formulated and their predictions quantified. A great many of physics' definitions, models, and theories are expressed using mathematical symbols and formulas.

The central difference between physics and mathematics is that ultimately physics is concerned with descriptions of the material world whereas mathematics is focused on abstract logical patterns that may extend beyond the real world.

Because physics concentrates on the material world, it tests its theories through the process known as observation or experimentation. In theory, it may seem relatively easier to detect where physics leaves off and mathematics picks up. However, in reality, such a clean-cut distinction does not always exist. Hence, the gray areas in between physics and mathematics tend be called "mathematical physics."

I stand by the above waiting for your chickens to roost.

 

[DBT]

The Big Bang, if determinism is true, had the necessary elements for everything that followed, from Big Bang to us typing on our keyboards arguing over free will....just as you said.

And yet, the Big Bang itself plays no meaningful or relevant role in any human events.

It doesn't have to. The Big Bang got the show on the road and provided all the elements and rules for all events to unfold ....

A meaningful cause efficiently explains why something happened.
A relevant cause is something we can actually do something about.

If the Big Bang were a meaningful cause of my comments, then why do you address your responses to me? You obviously believe that I am the meaningful cause of my comments.

You don't exist in isolation. You do not act in isolation. Countless elements determine your behaviour and your response effects/determines countless others, which in turn......Nothing from the time of the Big Bang to our actions happen in isolation. Every component of the system is necessary to make the system as it is, and events to unfold as they do.

And you obviously know that there is nothing you can do about the Big Bang, so your only hope of effecting change in my comments is to address your comments to me.

Face it, the Big Bang is not a meaningful or relevant cause of your comments or mine.

The Big Bang is relevant as the initiator of all that followed. Without the BB nothing would exist. How we make decisions is determined by 13.6 billion years of astro-evolution and millions of years of biological evolution that gave us brains capable of processing information and interacting with the world.

Initial conditions -time t - plus natural law, and here we are; events proceeding naturally (as if "fixed as a matter of natural law") and reliably ("without deviation").

You can apply time t to any point in time and conditions will follow from the state of the system that point in time.

Yep. Here I am and here you are. Both products of the transformation over time of the stuff of the Big Bang into human beings capable of choosing for themselves what they will have from the restaurant menu.

It's not that we can't choose, clearly, we can. The issue is, how we are able to choose, the means by which we choose, and If the option we take is fixed, whether we r not we have the possibility of an alternate action, ie, choosing something else in any given instance in time...and if not, whether we can call our actions a matter of free will.

Without the possibility of alternate actions, free will it ain't.

Well, no. We've been over this repeatedly. The Big Bang was in fact "a past condition". Yet it is never held responsible for the lobster I ordered. And it is never held responsible for the robber holding up the convenience store.

Nobody is claiming that the BB is directly responsible for your dinner choice. A lot has happened since the Big Bang.

As you yourself said; ''Determinism means that events will proceed naturally (as if "fixed as a matter of natural law") and reliably ("without deviation").

Whether a person is free to decide for themselves what they will do, or instead coerced or unduly influenced into a choice they would not normally choose, is a meaningful and relevant issue in human affairs, especially when assigning moral or legal responsibility for their actions.

And this distinction is still meaningful within a deterministic view of the universe.

The argument for compatibilism holds.

legal affairs and abiding by the law assumes a sound mind capable of understanding the law and the consequences of breaking it. Our brain, if functional, is capable of understanding how the world works, the very thing evolution has enabled.

Information processing is not free will.

Summary: The brain is often likened to a processor. A complex computing machine that takes raw data and turns it into thoughts, memories, and cognitions. However, it has its limits, and Instructional Designers must know the boundaries before they can create meaningful eLearning courses. In this article, I'll explore how the brain works, from its basic biological and memory functions to its ability to process information.

Information Processing Basics: A Guide For Instructional Designers

''The brain is a wondrous thing. It transforms letters, numbers, and images into meaningful data that governs every aspect of our lives. Neural pathways spark and new ideas meet with the old to form complex schematic structures. But one of the most miraculous tasks it tackles is learning.''