Compatibilism: What's that About?

[Marvin Edwards]

Reality is only approached by those subject to it, never told nor realized. It is beyond the observer's kin to fathom reality. Full stop.

It is for this reason that there is relevance to subjective experience. It is all we have unless we tie what we believe to what is known. What is known is what is accomplished by objective, material, observation and analysis. This method, by the by, is the only hope for eventual understanding of at least local reality.

It is in the apparent inevitable push of living things to evolve. Being more capable of functioning, less subject to chaos more tuned to keeping energy longer and better is driving life forward. Finding and sustaining maximum entropies in the physical world guide us to certification of realities.

What you describe is hugging, clinging to, uncertain unproven, self identified, apparent realities can only lead to unforeseen catastrophic ends.

It is as I wrote early on. Philosophy is about rationalization and self evidence. Science is about observing and and building upon objective realities. The first is folly. The latter is continuously becoming more consistent and reliable, improving prospects for understanding over the past 600 years.

It is not about what we believe, what we subjectively know by looking inside ourselves. It is about what we objectively know and with which we can demonstrably exercise control over what is there that leads to actual knowledge.

Just as subjective fails in knowing it also fails in science as we are finding with Psychoanalysis, learning theory, functionalism, structuralism, and a variety of other self attributable isms. All are rotting on failed self insight precepts. Critics were right to throw out the bathwater with Wundt's Introspection, no matter how sincerely he believed in what he was about. We need an objective method.

Skinners counting bullae is not objective beyond observation of turds. Turds must be generated and knowing how and why they are generated might lead somewhere. But that wasn't the result of his method, Instead it was schedules of reinforcement.

Put Skinner there with Wundt. As for Freud find me the mechanics of for energies of ego, id, etc. They aren't there. Drop him into the shit bin as well.

WTF.

Permitting such as your smooth sounding platitude laden subjective declared sieves leads to an empty vessel. No knowledge remains, just empty proclamations.

Fluussshh!

I wouldn't know a Wundt from a Bundt cake. I've read a little B.F. Skinner and probably some Watson many years ago. But my understanding is that modern methods like Albert Ellis's Rational Emotive Therapy (RET) take the most practical and direct approach and have the best success. I'm a William James Pragmatist, and very fond of things that actually work.

As to "reality", we are limited to our perceptions, and out attention is often easily distracted and deceived by professional magicians. So, our neural modeling mechanism sometimes produces illusions. But the model is our only access to reality. We can educate ourselves to interpret what we see differently, but we're kinda limited to a "what you see is what you get" view. We must deal with what we can see, hear, touch, etc.

That's the solution to the "brain-in-a-vat" and the "solipsism" paradoxes. If we were indeed a brain in an evil scientist's vat, and what we perceived of reality was totally controlled by the signals the scientist provided by wires going into our head, then as far as we could know, that would be our reality. We would never perceive the vat or the wires, but only the dreams the scientist induced. So, that would, for all practical purposes, be our "reality".

The same applies to the question, "What if we the only being that existed, and we were asleep, and everyone and everything we experienced was merely a dream?" (solipsism). Again, everything we dreamt would, for all practical purposes be our "reality'.

If there is nothing one can know, other than what we think we are seeing and hearing and smelling and touching, then that, for all practical purposes, is the only reality. And, since that is the case, we call it "reality".

Science extends our vision with telescopes and microscopes. It lets us see things that we would not otherwise be aware of. Things which still remain invisible, like the protons in the atom, are tracked by their electromechanical effects in the giant colliders. But they were theorized to exist by models before they could be detected.

Some models are more useful than others. And some models have proven to be false.

But for most practical human problems, we have sufficient objective information to provide useful descriptions of what is going on in the real world. We test our language, our words and concepts, as we use them everyday to do our everyday things.

Free will, to the mind uninfected by the philosophical paradox, remains a choice we make for ourselves when free of coercion and other forms of undue influence. It empirically distinguishes the voluntary, deliberate choice we make for ourselves, from those choices imposed upon us by someone or something else. And that is its practical utility, what William James would call the "cash-value" of the concept.

Pragmatism, on the other hand, asks its usual question. “Grant an idea or belief to be true,” it says, “what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone’s actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth’s cash-value in experiential terms?” The moment pragmatism asks this question, it sees the answer: True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that, therefore, is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known-as.

James, William. Pragmatism (Dover Thrift Editions) (p. 67). Dover Publications. Kindle Edition.

 

[Jarhyn]

It's beyond the observer's Ken to understand reality?

This is trivially false. If it were true I would not have a job. My job is, as an observer, to understand reality well enough not only to make good decisions that react to that reality in a way that brings me closer to my goals... And then to describe exactly the reasons I made those decisions for the purposes of collaboration and advancing public understanding.

It is possibly beyond an observer's ken to implement the reality we find ourselves in in total, but even that is questionably true. To describe and understand it? Not so much.

In fact, unning on my CPU I can have a full virtualization of that selfsame CPU. All of the laws of processing reality may be written down and modelled inside a process inside that reality!

I can have a virtual x86 with 2000mb of virtual address space running on an actual x86 with 2000mb of physical address space. Then on that I could have a other simulation of the same thing inside the simulation. As long as it does not run up against certain resource limits owing to recursion, I could even have a process which reads it's next instruction, runs other instructions that calculate the result, and then rewrites the next instruction based on whether it executes or generates an exception that never even happened "in reality".

Nothing in reality prevents this, so why would you think that reality itself prevents the architecture of reality itself from being so modelled. Is it the "complexity" of the architecture that trips you? Because that's not a qualitative difference.

 

[fromderinside]

It's beyond the observer's Ken to understand reality?

This is trivially false. If it were true I would not have a job. My job is, as an observer, to understand reality well enough not only to make good decisions that react to that reality in a way that brings me closer to my goals... And then to describe exactly the reasons I made those decisions for the purposes of collaboration and advancing public understanding.

It is possibly beyond an observer's ken to implement the reality we find ourselves in in total, but even that is questionably true. To describe and understand it? Not so much.

In fact, unning on my CPU I can have a full virtualization of that selfsame CPU. All of the laws of processing reality may be written down and modelled inside a process inside that reality!

I can have a virtual x86 with 2000mb of virtual address space running on an actual x86 with 2000mb of physical address space. Then on that I could have a other simulation of the same thing inside the simulation. As long as it does not run up against certain resource limits owing to recursion, I could even have a process which reads it's next instruction, runs other instructions that calculate the result, and then rewrites the next instruction based on whether it executes or generates an exception that never even happened "in reality".

Nothing in reality prevents this, so why would you think that reality itself prevents the architecture of reality itself from being so modelled. Is it the "complexity" of the architecture that trips you? Because that's not a qualitative difference.

Reality, the whole of existence. It isn't beyond our ability to know? ARE YOU SERIOUS! We live on a dot in another bigger dot in a system of bigger dots that that seem to be organized into even bigger systems of dots. They are beyond our ability to even see remotely, much less experience. Humanity will never experience even a mote of what exists. If you think we can know the cosmos by looking at it with limited senses and tools you are a deluding yourself.

The energy to which we have access can break things down to infinitesimally small things. Imagine what the energy of the entire universe can do. We have an imaginary scheme which we believe represents what is there and seems to work locally. Now that's hutzpah.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

That term 'free will' is being asserted as a causally necessary event for the purpose of constructing an argument.

No. I'm not interested in arguments. I'm simply trying to keep the empirical facts clear.

All events within a determined system are 'causally necessitated events,'

Yes, but they are not necessitated by any abstract notion of causation nor by any abstract notion of necessity. They are necessitated by real causes, you know, the actual interactions of real objects and real forces.

For example, Babe Ruth hit a home run. The home run was an event necessitated by Babe Ruth's swing of the bat which caused the bat to hit the ball in such a way that it caused the ball to fly over the outfield fence.

But causal necessity itself played no part in that event. Babe Ruth himself causally necessitated this event. And it is the same for all of the prior causes of Babe Ruth. None of his prior causes were "causal necessity". But each of his prior causes were real entities. For example, his father and his mother, by their actions, causally necessitated a baby to be born.

... alternatives do not exist.

We've covered that. Realizable alternatives (or options) are possibilities, things that "can" happen even if they never "will" happen. Possibilities exist solely within the imagination. A "real" possibility is something that we can make happen if we choose to make it happen. Something that we cannot make happen, even if we choose to, is an impossibility. But the fact that we do not choose to make it happen does not make it an impossibility, it only makes it an alternative that we did not choose.

It is still a realizable alternative, even if we never choose to actualize it.

Within the big machine (universal causal necessity), there are little machines (humans) that each contain another machine (the brain) that settles matters of uncertainty by choosing what to do next. All alternatives exist within the choosing machine as logical tokens that are necessary for its successful operation.

A web of unfolding events ...

Yes, a lovely metaphor.

... where will plays no role in decision making.

And that is because it is the decision making that forms the will. For example, "Will I have eggs or will I have pancakes? I don't know, let me think about it". We think about it and we decide "I will have pancakes". That sets our intent upon fixing pancakes, and that intent motivates and directs our subsequent actions: mixing the batter, heating the griddle, cooking the pancakes, and eating them.

And if will plays no regulative role in decision making, how is it meant to be free?

Free will is not a "free floating" or "uncaused" will. I don't know where you guys get that bit of silliness.

Free will is literally a freely chosen "I will". It is about the choosing of the will. Are we free to choose for ourselves what we will do (e.g., eggs or pancakes) or is this choice imposed upon us by someone or something else (e.g., a five year old who wants pancakes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner versus his health-conscious mother who imposes her will upon him).

Saying something is free doesn't make it free.

Saying something is NOT free requires the identification of a meaningful and relevant constraint. In the absence of such a constraint, freedom is logically presumed.

Unimpeded but necessitated actions do not equate to freedom of will.

Causal necessity is neither a meaningful nor a relevant constraint. In the absence of a meaningful and relevant constraint, freedom is logically the default case.

Will is neither the originator or decision maker.

Will is not the decision maker, it is the causally necessary result of the decision. However, once we've set our minds to a task, the task itself may require additional decisions to be made.

Our will is the originator of our subsequent actions.

The evidence from neuroscience doesn't support free will.

No. The evidence from neuroscience does not support the notion of any "free floating" or "uncaused" will. But neuroscience is very aware that we make choices that determine what we will do. This is an empirical fact that cannot be denied (except perhaps by the hard determinists, due to their illusions).

Actions are initiated by brain regions based on input and memory function and brought to consciousness. Will is not the regulator or the means by which thoughts and actions are generated.

The brain, when seated in a restaurant and facing a menu, must decide what to order, otherwise the brain will suffer hunger. The brain making choices is a causally necessary event.

The brain's freely chosen "I will" regulates the body's actions as it tells the waiter, "I will have the steak dinner."

... Free will is merely an ideology built on semantics.

Free will makes the significant distinction between a deliberate or voluntary act, versus a coerced act, versus an insane act. This distinction has practical consequences in the real world.

Universal causal necessity/inevitability, on the other hand, is an insignificant logical fact, that should have no practical consequences at all in the real world.

What I said is just the nature of determinism. I pointed out that necessitated action, being determined, cannot have constraints, they must proceed as determined. The earth's orbit around the sun is not restrained, for instance, yet it is determined, gravity, mass, etc.

Well, inanimate objects, like the earth and the sun, are not likely to experience freedom or constraints, they have no interests in exercising control over their fates.

But to us, constraints that prevent us from doing what we want are experienced negatively, and when such constraints are lifted, we experience the freedom positively. Otherwise freedom and constraint would be meaningless.

So when the hard determinist tells us we are not free, and even worse, when he suckers us into the illusion that ordinary cause and effect makes us slaves, then we naturally object.

The correct understanding of reliable causation is that it enables us to do things. It is the very source of every freedom we have. So when the hard determinist perversely presents reliable causation as a boogeyman that robs us of our free will, our control, our responsibility, and other human traits of great value to our species, he does moral harm to us all.

I type whatever is coming to mind. Thoughts are formed in response to the stimuli.

What comes to mind is determined by what I am being presented with - your argument - by reading your posts, which is sensory input, 'my' brain processes the acquired information according to neural architecture, memory function/past experience (brain information state) generating lines of thought. Which is not known until the necessary information is acquired and processed followed by related actions.

Which has very little to do with 'will' beyond the consciously felt impulse to respond, nothing whatsoever to do with 'free will.'

The cognitive process does not equate to free will.

Which "free will" are you referring to? The paradoxical "freedom from causal necessity" or the operational definition "freedom from coercion and undue influence".

If you are using the so-called "philosophical" definition, "a choice we make for ourselves that is free from causal necessity", then you owe us an explanation as to what you think that means, and how it is supposed to work in a deterministic universe.

If you cannot defend the use of that definition, then I suggest you stop using it.

Once the desire to do X is felt, there are no other constraints that keep the person from doing what he wants, namely X.

For goodness sake let's hope not! Men who experience a desire to have sex with a woman and who act upon that desire without thinking are called "rapists''

That's not what I meant, which I'm certain you know.

Of course. But that is what your words literally mean when you say, "Once the desire to do X is felt, there are no other constraints that keep the person from doing what he wants, namely X." You are saying that the desire is sufficient to cause the act, and that nothing constrains the act.

The issue here is: even when acting according to one's will, unimpeded, unrestricted, we are acting in accordance to inner necessity. If an action is determined, wanting to do something is fully determined by prior causes and nothing prevents that person from doing what he wants, both the desire or will to act and the action is determined.

Yeah, but all actions are equally causally necessary and equally causally determined. So what? How does this logical fact change anything? For example, in what way does it change the operational meaning of free will?

''Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity'' - Einstein.

“If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle.” William James

James, William. Pragmatism (Dover Thrift Editions) (p. 16). Dover Publications. Kindle Edition.

 

[fromderinside]

Reality is only approached by those subject to it, never told nor realized. It is beyond the observer's kin to fathom reality. Full stop.

It is for this reason that there is relevance to subjective experience. It is all we have unless we tie what we believe to what is known. What is known is what is accomplished by objective, material, observation and analysis. This method, by the by, is the only hope for eventual understanding of at least local reality.

It is in the apparent inevitable push of living things to evolve. Being more capable of functioning, less subject to chaos more tuned to keeping energy longer and better is driving life forward. Finding and sustaining maximum entropies in the physical world guide us to certification of realities.

What you describe is hugging, clinging to, uncertain unproven, self identified, apparent realities can only lead to unforeseen catastrophic ends.

It is as I wrote early on. Philosophy is about rationalization and self evidence. Science is about observing and and building upon objective realities. The first is folly. The latter is continuously becoming more consistent and reliable, improving prospects for understanding over the past 600 years.

It is not about what we believe, what we subjectively know by looking inside ourselves. It is about what we objectively know and with which we can demonstrably exercise control over what is there that leads to actual knowledge.

Just as subjective fails in knowing it also fails in science as we are finding with Psychoanalysis, learning theory, functionalism, structuralism, and a variety of other self attributable isms. All are rotting on failed self insight precepts. Critics were right to throw out the bathwater with Wundt's Introspection, no matter how sincerely he believed in what he was about. We need an objective method.

Skinners counting bullae is not objective beyond observation of turds. Turds must be generated and knowing how and why they are generated might lead somewhere. But that wasn't the result of his method, Instead it was schedules of reinforcement.

Put Skinner there with Wundt. As for Freud find me the mechanics of for energies of ego, id, etc. They aren't there. Drop him into the shit bin as well.

WTF.

Permitting such as your smooth sounding platitude laden subjective declared sieves leads to an empty vessel. No knowledge remains, just empty proclamations.

Fluussshh!

I wouldn't know a Wundt from a Bundt cake. I've read a little B.F. Skinner and probably some Watson many years ago. But my understanding is that modern methods like Albert Ellis's Rational Emotive Therapy (RET) take the most practical and direct approach and have the best success. I'm a William James Pragmatist, and very fond of things that actually work.

As to "reality", we are limited to our perceptions, and out attention is often easily distracted and deceived by professional magicians. So, our neural modeling mechanism sometimes produces illusions. But the model is our only access to reality. We can educate ourselves to interpret what we see differently, but we're kinda limited to a "what you see is what you get" view. We must deal with what we can see, hear, touch, etc.

That's the solution to the "brain-in-a-vat" and the "solipsism" paradoxes. If we were indeed a brain in an evil scientist's vat, and what we perceived of reality was totally controlled by the signals the scientist provided by wires going into our head, then as far as we could know, that would be our reality. We would never perceive the vat or the wires, but only the dreams the scientist induced. So, that would, for all practical purposes, be our "reality".

The same applies to the question, "What if we the only being that existed, and we were asleep, and everyone and everything we experienced was merely a dream?" (solipsism). Again, everything we dreamt would, for all practical purposes be our "reality'.

If there is nothing one can know, other than what we think we are seeing and hearing and smelling and touching, then that, for all practical purposes, is the only reality. And, since that is the case, we call it "reality".

Science extends our vision with telescopes and microscopes. It lets us see things that we would not otherwise be aware of. Things which still remain invisible, like the protons in the atom, are tracked by their electromechanical effects in the giant colliders. But they were theorized to exist by models before they could be detected.

Some models are more useful than others. And some models have proven to be false.

But for most practical human problems, we have sufficient objective information to provide useful descriptions of what is going on in the real world. We test our language, our words and concepts, as we use them everyday to do our everyday things.

Free will, to the mind uninfected by the philosophical paradox, remains a choice we make for ourselves when free of coercion and other forms of undue influence. It empirically distinguishes the voluntary, deliberate choice we make for ourselves, from those choices imposed upon us by someone or something else. And that is its practical utility, what William James would call the "cash-value" of the concept.

Pragmatism, on the other hand, asks its usual question. “Grant an idea or belief to be true,” it says, “what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone’s actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth’s cash-value in experiential terms?” The moment pragmatism asks this question, it sees the answer: True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that, therefore, is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known-as.

James, William. Pragmatism (Dover Thrift Editions) (p. 67). Dover Publications. Kindle Edition.

Isn't that cute. You claim little knowledge of psychology - your denial of knowing an alleged father of psychology - then you use the work of a relativity minor psychologist as your "ode de triumph". The world is full of pragmatists. Not one of them ever contributed to our increased understanding of ourselves or the world we live in. Sure they give comfort to our inner impulses. But a "Eureka"? Never.

 

[fromderinside]

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!

 

[Jarhyn]

It's beyond the observer's Ken to understand reality?

This is trivially false. If it were true I would not have a job. My job is, as an observer, to understand reality well enough not only to make good decisions that react to that reality in a way that brings me closer to my goals... And then to describe exactly the reasons I made those decisions for the purposes of collaboration and advancing public understanding.

It is possibly beyond an observer's ken to implement the reality we find ourselves in in total, but even that is questionably true. To describe and understand it? Not so much.

In fact, unning on my CPU I can have a full virtualization of that selfsame CPU. All of the laws of processing reality may be written down and modelled inside a process inside that reality!

I can have a virtual x86 with 2000mb of virtual address space running on an actual x86 with 2000mb of physical address space. Then on that I could have a other simulation of the same thing inside the simulation. As long as it does not run up against certain resource limits owing to recursion, I could even have a process which reads it's next instruction, runs other instructions that calculate the result, and then rewrites the next instruction based on whether it executes or generates an exception that never even happened "in reality".

Nothing in reality prevents this, so why would you think that reality itself prevents the architecture of reality itself from being so modelled. Is it the "complexity" of the architecture that trips you? Because that's not a qualitative difference.

Reality, the whole of existence. It isn't beyond our ability to know? ARE YOU SERIOUS! We live on a dot in another bigger dot in a system of bigger dots that that seem to be organized into even bigger systems of dots. They are beyond our ability to even see remotely, much less experience. Humanity will never experience even a mote of what exists. If you think we can know the cosmos by looking at it with limited senses and tools you are a deluding yourself.

The energy to which we have access can break things down to infinitesimally small things. Imagine what the energy of the entire universe can do. We have an imaginary scheme which we believe represents what is there and seems to work locally. Now that's hutzpah.

I can describe the whole of a computer on a tiny bit of paper. I can describe the whole of a massive yet deterministic output that sits in gigabytes of memory with 20kb of code. Yes, you can describe a whole universe, "understand" it's basis, in less space than it takes to implement the universe. Because of this reality of possibility, seen through the transform of us doing exactly that thing, yes it is possible as an architectural curiosity that the architecture hosts a perfect description of the code that produces it.

It's possible for a set that describes a set of points to include the description which defined the set, if one of the varieties of points it describes is of the form "functional description as point".

You confuse implementation and understanding.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

Isn't that cute. You claim little knowledge of psychology - your denial of knowing an alleged father of psychology - then you use the work of a relativity minor psychologist as your "ode de triumph". The world is full of pragmatists. Not one of them ever contributed to our increased understanding of ourselves or the world we live in. Sure they give comfort to our inner impulses. But a "Eureka"? Never.

All I can do with that is follow this wise man's advice:

Fluussshh!

 

[fromderinside]

It's beyond the observer's Ken to understand reality?

This is trivially false. If it were true I would not have a job. My job is, as an observer, to understand reality well enough not only to make good decisions that react to that reality in a way that brings me closer to my goals... And then to describe exactly the reasons I made those decisions for the purposes of collaboration and advancing public understanding.

It is possibly beyond an observer's ken to implement the reality we find ourselves in in total, but even that is questionably true. To describe and understand it? Not so much.

In fact, unning on my CPU I can have a full virtualization of that selfsame CPU. All of the laws of processing reality may be written down and modelled inside a process inside that reality!

I can have a virtual x86 with 2000mb of virtual address space running on an actual x86 with 2000mb of physical address space. Then on that I could have a other simulation of the same thing inside the simulation. As long as it does not run up against certain resource limits owing to recursion, I could even have a process which reads it's next instruction, runs other instructions that calculate the result, and then rewrites the next instruction based on whether it executes or generates an exception that never even happened "in reality".

Nothing in reality prevents this, so why would you think that reality itself prevents the architecture of reality itself from being so modelled. Is it the "complexity" of the architecture that trips you? Because that's not a qualitative difference.

Reality, the whole of existence. It isn't beyond our ability to know? ARE YOU SERIOUS! We live on a dot in another bigger dot in a system of bigger dots that that seem to be organized into even bigger systems of dots. They are beyond our ability to even see remotely, much less experience. Humanity will never experience even a mote of what exists. If you think we can know the cosmos by looking at it with limited senses and tools you are a deluding yourself.

The energy to which we have access can break things down to infinitesimally small things. Imagine what the energy of the entire universe can do. We have an imaginary scheme which we believe represents what is there and seems to work locally. Now that's hutzpah.

I can describe the whole of a computer on a tiny bit of paper. I can describe the whole of a massive yet deterministic output that sits in gigabytes of memory with 20kb of code. Yes, you can describe a whole universe, "understand" it's basis, in less space than it takes to implement the universe. Because of this reality of possibility, seen through the transform of us doing exactly that thing, yes it is possible as an architectural curiosity that the architecture hosts a perfect description of the code that produces it.

It's possible for a set that describes a set of points to include the description which defined the set, if one of the varieties of points it describes is of the form "functional description as point".

You confuse implementation and understanding.

Understanding can explain things but do they really explain things. For instance will the impact of another instance of all the energy in the big bag produce another identical universe? If so , why waste our time on multiple universes if what takes place is identical to that which took place? Is a probabilistic model of the world what reality comes down to?

Humanity is at the very beginning of understanding the world we find ourselves? Why not think that we might go from rational models to material models to models that include what we can imagine like travelable dimensions.

I confuse nothing. You, on the other hand seem arrogant with your little knowledge. We know less about what reality is than we know what history was. Now in that pairing there is an analogy with your notion about knowing and understanding.

We have the bones, history, evidence, but we aren't sure what they mean. Was it because we went to the sea when things were really bad about 40 thousand years ago, used sea protein, then evolved religious capabilities. Are humans 200,000 or closer to 40,000 years old?

 

[fromderinside]

Isn't that cute. You claim little knowledge of psychology - your denial of knowing an alleged father of psychology - then you use the work of a relativity minor psychologist as your "ode de triumph". The world is full of pragmatists. Not one of them ever contributed to our increased understanding of ourselves or the world we live in. Sure they give comfort to our inner impulses. But a "Eureka"? Never.

All I can do with that is follow this wise man's advice:

Fluussshh!

Great. You do that. Be sure you wipe up all that glad handing Pollyanna stuff you wrote.

 

[DBT]

The evidence from neuroscience doesn't support free will.

You keep making the same mistake.

Of course "neuroscience" doesn't support incompatibilist free will - nothing does!

But "neuroscience" has nothing to say about compatibilist free will. To think that it does is to misunderstand the claims of compatibilists.

No mistake. Nothing does support freedom of will, not even the compatibilist definition of it, which, as pointed out numerous times is merely a semantic construct.

Yet again;

Semantic constructs prove nothing;

Definitions or ontological arguments prove nothing.

1)God is love.
2)Love can be experienced.
3)Love exists.
4)God exists.

The common definition of free will is equally meaningless:

1)Free will is the ability to make conscious decisions.
2)Conscious decision making can be experienced.
3)Conscious decision making exists.
4) Free will exists.

1) Free will is the ability to act in accordance with our will.
2) We are able to act in accordance to our will
3) We have free will.


Which of course ignores the means by which actions, including will are produced by external information acting upon non chosen neural networks, which is internal necessity, not freedom.


''An action’s production by a deterministic process, even when the agent satisfies the conditions on moral responsibility specified by compatibilists, presents no less of a challenge to basic-desert responsibility than does deterministic manipulation by other agents. '


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.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

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.

 

[DBT]

That term 'free will' is being asserted as a causally necessary event for the purpose of constructing an argument.

No. I'm not interested in arguments. I'm simply trying to keep the empirical facts clear.

All events within a determined system are 'causally necessitated events,'

Yes, but they are not necessitated by any abstract notion of causation nor by any abstract notion of necessity. They are necessitated by real causes, you know, the actual interactions of real objects and real forces.

For example, Babe Ruth hit a home run. The home run was an event necessitated by Babe Ruth's swing of the bat which caused the bat to hit the ball in such a way that it caused the ball to fly over the outfield fence.

But causal necessity itself played no part in that event. Babe Ruth himself causally necessitated this event. And it is the same for all of the prior causes of Babe Ruth. None of his prior causes were "causal necessity". But each of his prior causes were real entities. For example, his father and his mother, by their actions, causally necessitated a baby to be born.

I didn't say anything about abstract notions of necessity. Necessity refers to physical determinism, how determinism works through real objects, real events and how real information acts upon the neural networks of a brain to produce consciousness, mind, self, thought and response, which is not the role of 'free will,' where actions, if determined, necessarily proceed accordingly.

... alternatives do not exist.

We've covered that. Realizable alternatives (or options) are possibilities, things that "can" happen even if they never "will" happen. Possibilities exist solely within the imagination. A "real" possibility is something that we can make happen if we choose to make it happen. Something that we cannot make happen, even if we choose to, is an impossibility. But the fact that we do not choose to make it happen does not make it an impossibility, it only makes it an alternative that we did not choose.

It is still a realizable alternative, even if we never choose to actualize it.

Within the big machine (universal causal necessity), there are little machines (humans) that each contain another machine (the brain) that settles matters of uncertainty by choosing what to do next. All alternatives exist within the choosing machine as logical tokens that are necessary for its successful operation.

We don't make anything happen that has not been determined to happen. Within a determined system, the external world acts upon the brain (being an inseparable part of it), shaping and forming character, personality, likes dislikes, hate, fear, irritations, beliefs, thoughts, including the will and actions that follow from that essential condition.

Again, nothing to do with 'free will.'

And that is because it is the decision making that forms the will. For example, "Will I have eggs or will I have pancakes? I don't know, let me think about it". We think about it and we decide "I will have pancakes". That sets our intent upon fixing pancakes, and that intent motivates and directs our subsequent actions: mixing the batter, heating the griddle, cooking the pancakes, and eating them.

What you have for breakfast is determined by what you do or do not like, information acquired by the brain through experience with various foods, and what is currently on the menu. Your brain processes that information and initiates the only possible response in this instance in time ( alternatives being impossible within a determined system, events being fixed as a matter of natural law and antecedent events), information processing that has nothing to do with free will or freely willed decisions.

Information processing is not free will.

''If one had the murderous impulses of an Eichmann or a Himmler, is one’s situation necessarily improved by being able to flexibly respond to the logistical problems of machine-gunning large numbers of people? Is the murderous intelligence involved in industrialising genocide ever a gain? Similarly, if we knew that we were going to have passions that we have not chosen, is it obvious that we would ask for the ability to pursue these passions flexibly and imaginatively? Perhaps if we knew that we were to have unknown passions and be held responsible for our actions, we would choose to be incompetent. Perhaps the priority would be first to do no harm: one could not risk being good at being bad.

It is not obvious then that we would choose to be caused by our own desires rather than coerced by others; and nor is it obvious that we would choose to be able to successfully pursue our desires if we did not know what those desires were to be.''


I'll stop there for the sake of brevity, and to avoid further repetition.

 

[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.

 

[Jarhyn]

It's beyond the observer's Ken to understand reality?

This is trivially false. If it were true I would not have a job. My job is, as an observer, to understand reality well enough not only to make good decisions that react to that reality in a way that brings me closer to my goals... And then to describe exactly the reasons I made those decisions for the purposes of collaboration and advancing public understanding.

It is possibly beyond an observer's ken to implement the reality we find ourselves in in total, but even that is questionably true. To describe and understand it? Not so much.

In fact, unning on my CPU I can have a full virtualization of that selfsame CPU. All of the laws of processing reality may be written down and modelled inside a process inside that reality!

I can have a virtual x86 with 2000mb of virtual address space running on an actual x86 with 2000mb of physical address space. Then on that I could have a other simulation of the same thing inside the simulation. As long as it does not run up against certain resource limits owing to recursion, I could even have a process which reads it's next instruction, runs other instructions that calculate the result, and then rewrites the next instruction based on whether it executes or generates an exception that never even happened "in reality".

Nothing in reality prevents this, so why would you think that reality itself prevents the architecture of reality itself from being so modelled. Is it the "complexity" of the architecture that trips you? Because that's not a qualitative difference.

Reality, the whole of existence. It isn't beyond our ability to know? ARE YOU SERIOUS! We live on a dot in another bigger dot in a system of bigger dots that that seem to be organized into even bigger systems of dots. They are beyond our ability to even see remotely, much less experience. Humanity will never experience even a mote of what exists. If you think we can know the cosmos by looking at it with limited senses and tools you are a deluding yourself.

The energy to which we have access can break things down to infinitesimally small things. Imagine what the energy of the entire universe can do. We have an imaginary scheme which we believe represents what is there and seems to work locally. Now that's hutzpah.

I can describe the whole of a computer on a tiny bit of paper. I can describe the whole of a massive yet deterministic output that sits in gigabytes of memory with 20kb of code. Yes, you can describe a whole universe, "understand" it's basis, in less space than it takes to implement the universe. Because of this reality of possibility, seen through the transform of us doing exactly that thing, yes it is possible as an architectural curiosity that the architecture hosts a perfect description of the code that produces it.

It's possible for a set that describes a set of points to include the description which defined the set, if one of the varieties of points it describes is of the form "functional description as point".

You confuse implementation and understanding.

Understanding can explain things but do they really explain things. For instance will the impact of another instance of all the energy in the big bag produce another identical universe? If so , why waste our time on multiple universes if what takes place is identical to that which took place? Is a probabilistic model of the world what reality comes down to?

Humanity is at the very beginning of understanding the world we find ourselves? Why not think that we might go from rational models to material models to models that include what we can imagine like travelable dimensions.

I confuse nothing. You, on the other hand seem arrogant with your little knowledge. We know less about what reality is than we know what history was. Now in that pairing there is an analogy with your notion about knowing and understanding.

We have the bones, history, evidence, but we aren't sure what they mean. Was it because we went to the sea when things were really bad about 40 thousand years ago, used sea protein, then evolved religious capabilities. Are humans 200,000 or closer to 40,000 years old?

Understanding in this way says the shape of the thing. Now sometimes the shape is such that it implies things about the framework fits in. Sometimes it says absolutely nothing about that framework.

You can claim you understand these things, or even wave your hands around incredulously, but it doesn't change the fact that you don't seem to really grasp it at all. You confuse implementation with understanding.

There are exactly two things to understand OF reality, and then myriad things to be understood about metaphysics and we know for certain we CAN understand it to the extent that any thing can be tested and confirmed experimentally: the rules which govern the probability of events (why do the dice turn out the way they do?), A perhaps impossible question to answer; the rules which determine which loci may replace whichever other loci when a probabilistic event happens.

You keep confusing implementation and understanding. Understanding is knowing the equation and being able to plot points on it.

I focus on what architecturally defined reality, in various respects.

Your initial claim was that we cannot understand reality, which is downright silly. I understand reality exactly well enough to hammer some.of that reality with some reality into a long bit of reality, connect that reality to some other reality, and then some of the reality will end up in the center of that other long bit of reality that I made and connected, or to go away from it. I know this happens because on a fundamental level reality only pops and jives a certain way. I UNDERSTAND this. We can complete this understanding, as I described previous.

Now, being fully aware of history, being OMNISCIENT and also being confined to existing "only within" the universe... That would be impossible. In fact, we understand that it is impossible, and have proven it: a system cannot contain a complete implementation of itself.

It's one of the reasons why math can't express a set that contains all sets. But a set can contain a description, an understanding of itself... Just not the whole thing in truth.

Do not call me arrogant again with knowledge that you have not bothered to take the time to understand.

Come to me when YOU have taken the time. Maybe spin up a universe and then meditate on the geometry and facts of what happened and what this implies about universes, and try to puzzle out what information and understanding about itself that it may contain and which that it may not, and whether the particular implementation is the only reason for some of these limitations.

As to trivia about what exactly happened within the confines of an architecture which implies a fixed but also probabilistically bounded outcome with apparently impenetrable randomness, I don't really give a shit. I just want to understand the system, so I can attain greater power to self-actualize in a mutually non-destructive way.

Knowing HOW "the present" functions does not require knowing what the present was doing in the past except to know that it functioned as "the present" always has, and that the present will now function as the present did yesterday. This can give us clues as to the state, but I don't care about the state. I care about the shape of the basic unit of the state machine's architecture.

I am a process existing in a machine attempting not to read the memory but to write into memory a reverse engineered description of the platform it runs on.

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.

So you know, this is a "no true Scotsman" fallacy. Just because I can bring a car undone by emptying the gas tank no more changes that when it has gas, that it moves forward.

Just because you can change things about a system to change how reality filtered through it, does not mean that thing was any less itself before you broke it.

This thing you call "will" is describable as "free" or "constrained" on the basis of the relationships that exist between the locus of one will and the locus of another and the geometry between them.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

I didn't say anything about abstract notions of necessity. Necessity refers to physical determinism, how determinism works through real objects, real events and how real information acts upon the neural networks of a brain to produce consciousness, mind, self, thought and response, which is not the role of 'free will,' where actions, if determined, necessarily proceed accordingly.

Okay, then! Once we've taken the abstract notions of "causation", "determinism", and "necessity" off the table of "causal agents", we are indeed left with the actual physical objects and the forces between them that, together, are doing all of the causing in the universe.

Now, we can observe those actual objects exerting force upon other objects, causing them to change in form or function or in some other way.

For example, I break the eggs. I pour them from the shell into the frying pan. I may scramble them and have them with ketchup, or perhaps have them sunny side up or over light with a little salt and pepper. That was me, doing the actual causing, changing the eggs into a meal.

I am not the abstraction of causal necessity, I am the actual cause that is necessitating what happens to the eggs. And it is I, and no other object in the physical universe, that gets to choose whether the eggs will be scrambled or sunny side up or over light.

Did I myself have prior causes? Well, of course. Everything always has prior causes. But over the years, I have also been one of the most significant prior causes of what I became at the time I chose how I would prepare the eggs. There were other causes, of course. When I was young I had to watch others as they fixed eggs in different ways in order to learn how to fix them myself. And there was the whole string of prior causes going back to my birth, back to the evolution of the human species, back to the Big Bang, and back to whatever preceded that.

But if you want to know who used up the last three eggs, making it impossible for you to fix french toast this morning, you will not complain to the Big Bang, you will complain to me, because you know that I am the most meaningful and relevant cause of there being no eggs left for you. And if you want to have french toast tomorrow, you might remind me to pick up a dozen at the store on my way home tonight.

Any complaints to the Big Bang, or Determinism, or Causal Necessity will fall upon deaf ears, since they have none.

We don't make anything happen that has not been determined to happen.

We don't need to make things happen "outside of causal necessity", because we are that which causally necessitates that the eggs are scrambled.

Nothing prior to us causally determined that the eggs would be scrambled. Everything prior to us guaranteed that it would be us making that decision for ourselves, and guaranteed that no other object prior to us at that moment would participate in making that choice.

Within a determined system, the external world acts upon the brain (being an inseparable part of it), shaping and forming character, personality, likes dislikes, hate, fear, irritations, beliefs, thoughts, including the will and actions that follow from that essential condition.

Again, nothing to do with 'free will.'

Exactly. Nothing at all to do with free will. Everyone knows that we are products of our nature and nurture, shaped by our prior experiences and our genetic dispositions. So, why bring it up?

Free will is when we decide for ourselves what we will do, when free of coercion and undue influence. Neither our nature nor our nurture is in itself coercive or undue. Everyone is affected by their nature and their nurture, so that cannot in itself be considered an undue influence.

What you have for breakfast is determined by what you do or do not like, information acquired by the brain through experience with various foods, and what is currently on the menu. Your brain processes that information and initiates the only possible response in this instance in time ( alternatives being impossible within a determined system, events being fixed as a matter of natural law and antecedent events), information processing that has nothing to do with free will or freely willed decisions.

Information processing is not free will.

Free will is when a person decides for themselves what they will do, when free of coercion and undue influence. It is nothing more and nothing less than that.

Events that constitute information processing would include the specific process of choosing what we will do. So, free will is an instance of information processing, but not all information processing is free will.

''If one had the murderous impulses of an Eichmann or a Himmler, is one’s situation necessarily improved by being able to flexibly respond to the logistical problems of machine-gunning large numbers of people? Is the murderous intelligence involved in industrialising genocide ever a gain? Similarly, if we knew that we were going to have passions that we have not chosen, is it obvious that we would ask for the ability to pursue these passions flexibly and imaginatively? Perhaps if we knew that we were to have unknown passions and be held responsible for our actions, we would choose to be incompetent. Perhaps the priority would be first to do no harm: one could not risk being good at being bad.

It is not obvious then that we would choose to be caused by our own desires rather than coerced by others; and nor is it obvious that we would choose to be able to successfully pursue our desires if we did not know what those desires were to be.''


I'll stop there for the sake of brevity, and to avoid further repetition.

Well, that was a fascinating article by Dr. Craig Ross. He did tip his hat to several compatibilists, Hobbes, Hume, and Dennett, which was a nice touch. Then he presented his specific argument.

Ironically, his argument suggests that under certain circumstances a person might choose (presumably of his own free will) to be coerced. His thought experiment suggests that we begin by imagining we are free floating entities being told by God that he plans to instill a set of desires into us and send us to earth as humans. Would we prefer to be at the mercy of these desires that might corrupt us, or would we rather be coerced into doing what is right and good (his scenario assumes we begin as entities with a strong desire to do what is right).

We don't really need a supernatural scenario to consider that. Some people, knowing that they are a danger to others, will choose to commit themselves for psychiatric treatment. Someone else, not caring that they will harm others, would choose not to commit themselves. In both cases, the choice is not coerced, but in the second case, the choice may be unduly influenced by the same mental illness that causes them to be a threat to others.

He then addresses Dennett's problem with "inevitability". Dennett apparently suggested that over time mankind has gained some control over events that were previously considered inevitable, such as the recent experiment at modifying the path of an asteroid to avoid it inevitably hitting the earth, thus making the inevitable, "evitable". Ross suggests that even the desire to make the inevitable evitable was causally necessary, being caused by our own desire to avoid the disastrous effects of the collision. So, it was still a matter of causal necessity.

I agree with with Ross on the Dennett matter. His insight is similar to the one I had in the public library after reading about the determinism versus free will issue in something by Spinoza. I'll detail it here for anyone who hasn't seen it:

The idea that my choices were inevitable bothered me, so I considered how I might escape what seemed like an external control. It struck me that all I needed to do was to wait till I had a decision to make, between A and B, and if I felt 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 caused B to become the inevitable choice, so I would have to switch back to A again, but then … it was an infinite loop!

No matter which I chose, inevitability would continue to switch to match my choice! Hmm. So, who was controlling the choice, me or inevitability?

Well, the concern that was driving my thought process was my own. Inevitability was not some entity driving this process for its own reasons. And I imagined that if inevitability were such an entity, it would be sitting there in the library laughing at me, because it made me go through these gyrations without doing anything at all, except for me thinking about it.

My choice may be a deterministic event, but it was an event where I was actually the one doing the choosing. And that is what free will is really about: is it me or is someone or something else making the decision. It was always really me.

And since the solution was so simple, I no longer gave it any thought. Then much later, just a few years ago, I ran into some on-line discussions about it, and I wondered why it was still a problem for everyone else, since I had seen through the paradox more than fifty years ago.

 

[fromderinside]

determinism

It's beyond the observer's Ken to understand reality?

This is trivially false. If it were true I would not have a job. My job is, as an observer, to understand reality well enough not only to make good decisions that react to that reality in a way that brings me closer to my goals... And then to describe exactly the reasons I made those decisions for the purposes of collaboration and advancing public understanding.

Let me be clear.

 Reality

I mean: Reality: the sum or aggregate of all that is material or existent within a system - the system all things physical in existence - as opposed to that which is only imaginary or not beyond our material grasp. The term is also used to refer to the ontological status of things, indicating their existence.[1] In physical terms, reality is the totality of a system, known and unknown.[2]

I do not mean: Philosophical questions about the nature of reality or existence or being are considered under the rubric of ontology, which is a major branch of metaphysics in the Western philosophical tradition.

 Knowing

I mean: a familiarity or awareness, of someone or something, such as facts (descriptive knowledge), skills (procedural knowledge), or objects (acquaintance knowledge) contributing to ones understanding.[1] By most accounts, knowledge can be acquired in many different ways and from many sources, including but not limited to perception, reason, memory, testimony, scientific inquiry, education, and practice.

Our understanding of reality is very incomplete mainly because we don't have access to enough knowledge about what is physical reality, primarily because we aren't capable of ever having that understanding due to material limitations in perception, reason, memory, testimony, scientific material for inquiry, education, nor practice.

Why ? I'm a determinist and trained scientist. I'm not an engineer as you appear to be 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.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

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.

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.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

"The best way to escape causal necessity is to fully embrace it. Once you see it everywhere, it disappears." MBE

The notion of universal causal necessity is logically derived from the presumption that we live in a world of reliable cause and effect. There is nothing exotic about reliable causation. We all take it for granted in everything we see and everything we do. Perhaps the exception to this rule are magic tricks, where the magician makes cards or coins show up as if out of nowhere, and then disappear again into nowhere. But we know that's "magic", we don't know how the trick is done, but we know it is a trick, and the cause of the trick is the magician.

Even if we do not know the cause, we always assume there is one. We care about causes because knowing the cause of an event often gives us some control over it. For example, knowing that a virus causes a disease, and knowing that our immune system can be primed to fight that disease with the proper vaccine, we now have control over many illnesses, and have freed ourselves from the sickness it caused. We have nearly eliminated Polio and Measles from the world through routine childhood vaccinations.

In our early history we invented gods to be the causes of events when the real causes were still unknown. And we prayed and made offerings to them to try to control the good or bad things that happened to us. So, the notion of reliable cause and effect, and the control it gives us over events, is pretty much ingrained into our nature.

If we know the causes, then can reliably predict the event. If we can reliably predict the event, then we may control its occurrence. If we can control its occurrence, then we are free to make it happen if it is a good event (planting seeds to grow crops), and free to prevent it from happening if it is a bad event (preventing disease through vaccination).

Reliable causation is our friend. We depend upon reliable causation for our freedom and for our control. Every ability we have, to do anything at all, requires reliable cause and effect. Without it, we could do nothing.

However, in addition to allowing us to cause effects, it also means that we ourselves are the effects of prior causes. Each of us has a history of how we got here and how we have grown and developed over the years.

History embodies the notion of causal necessity. Everyone has taken history courses in school. History traces the past events that have led naturally over time to current events. For example, the industrial revolution, led to the movement of populations from rural areas into cities as workers are required by factories. As we have invented new machines, new power sources, and new production techniques, we cause changes in our environment and those changes in turn affect us.

There's nothing surprising in the notion of causal necessity. It simply points out that every event has a history of prior events that caused it to happen precisely when, where, and how it did.

Yet many philosophers and even some scientists today view causal necessity as a threat to our freedom. They suggest to us that we cannot be "truly" free unless we are also "free from our own prior causes". But they never explain how such a thing is possible. Instead, they further suggest that our prior causes are the responsible causes of our actions, and that our current selves are not responsible for anything we do. One would think that such ideas would be dismissed out of hand as absurdities. But a false suggestion, presented in a believable fashion, often seduces the mind of even the most intelligent listener.

There was a philosopher named Zeno who created paradoxes for fun. One paradox involved the problem of getting from one place to another, for example, from one's chair to the doorway. You cannot get to the doorway without first getting halfway from the chair to the door. But you cannot get to the halfway point without first getting halfway to the halfway point. And you cannot get halfway to the halfway point without first getting halfway to the halfway of the halfway point. And so on. So, logically, due to the infinite number of steps required, it must be impossible to get from your chair to the door.

What is the false, but believable suggestion that created this paradox? The suggestion that you would travel to the halfway point rather than simply traveling to the door itself.

Returning to causal necessity, the false suggestion is that you must first be free of prior causes before you yourself can be the "true" cause of something else. But this requirement, that you cannot have any prior causes, creates an absurdity. Why? Because none of your prior causes can pass that test. Thus there would be no "true" causes, anywhere. So, reasonable minds would discard such a test because it creates a paradox that results in an absurdity. Just like Zeno's paradox that creates the absurdity that you cannot travel from your chair to the door.

The fact that we have prior causes leading up to who and what we are right now, does not prevent us from being the most meaningful and relevant cause of our choices and our actions.

But what about causal necessity itself? Isn't it the "true" cause of our choices and actions? No, not at all. Causal necessity is a concept used to describe the fact that each event is reliably caused. It is never a cause itself. Causal necessity is not some entity that goes about in the world controlling what people think and do. Rather, causal necessity is about what the people themselves are thinking and doing on their own, and how their behavior causally necessitates what will happen next.

Is causal necessity a meaningful or relevant constraint? Is it indeed something that we must be "free of" in order to be "truly" free? No, of course not. What we will inevitably do is exactly identical to us just being us, choosing what we choose, and doing what we do. So, no, causal necessity is not a meaningful constraint. It is not something that we need to be free of. In fact, reliable causation is the source of every freedom we have to do anything at all. So, it is nothing to be feared. It's just us, doing our thing.

 

[Jarhyn]

determinism

It's beyond the observer's Ken to understand reality?

This is trivially false. If it were true I would not have a job. My job is, as an observer, to understand reality well enough not only to make good decisions that react to that reality in a way that brings me closer to my goals... And then to describe exactly the reasons I made those decisions for the purposes of collaboration and advancing public understanding.

Let me be clear.

 Reality

I mean: Reality: the sum or aggregate of all that is material or existent within a system - the system all things physical in existence - as opposed to that which is only imaginary or not beyond our material grasp. The term is also used to refer to the ontological status of things, indicating their existence.[1] In physical terms, reality is the totality of a system, known and unknown.[2]

I do not mean: Philosophical questions about the nature of reality or existence or being are considered under the rubric of ontology, which is a major branch of metaphysics in the Western philosophical tradition.

 Knowing

I mean: a familiarity or awareness, of someone or something, such as facts (descriptive knowledge), skills (procedural knowledge), or objects (acquaintance knowledge) contributing to ones understanding.[1] By most accounts, knowledge can be acquired in many different ways and from many sources, including but not limited to perception, reason, memory, testimony, scientific inquiry, education, and practice.

Our understanding of reality is very incomplete mainly because we don't have access to enough knowledge about what is physical reality, primarily because we aren't capable of ever having that understanding due to material limitations in perception, reason, memory, testimony, scientific material for inquiry, education, nor practice.

Why ? I'm a determinist and trained scientist. I'm not an engineer as you appear to be 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.

Nice way of moving goalposts Mr scientist.

Now, the thing is, I am also a trained scientist as well as engineer, and a hobby mathematician.

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"