“Reality Goes Beyond Physics,” and more

[Jarhyn]

You can't be a compatibilist, while at the same time assert that alternate actions

Yet again this comes from failing to understand "alternate actions". There is an action, an alternative of "what may happen somewhere in the universe" to your left... And another to your right.

These are validly "alternatives".

This error of yours comes from an inability to properly abstract high dimensional spaces, and is a math error.

 

[Elixir]

You can't be a compatibilist, while at the same time assert that alternate actions

Yet again this comes from failing to understand "alternate actions". There is an action, an alternative of "what may happen somewhere in the universe" to your left... And another to your right.

These are validly "alternatives".

This error of yours comes from an inability to properly abstract high dimensional spaces, and is a math error.

That is a matter of perspective. If one considers only a moment in time, all alternatives are in play, including past and future. If one considers the full timeline of existence, only what has happened or will happen are valid possibilities.
The overriding FACT of our situation is that we have no sway over past or future; any “choice” we might have, only exists NOW. The reason it overrides any deterministic view of past and future is that all we have is NOW.

 

[peacegirl]

You can't be a compatibilist, while at the same time assert that alternate actions

Yet again this comes from failing to understand "alternate actions". There is an action, an alternative of "what may happen somewhere in the universe" to your left... And another to your right.

These are validly "alternatives".

This error of yours comes from an inability to properly abstract high dimensional spaces, and is a math error.

That is a matter of perspective. If one considers only a moment in time, all alternatives are in play, including past and future. If one considers the full timeline of existence, only what has happened or will happen are valid possibilities.
The overriding FACT of our situation is that we have no sway over past or future; any “choice” we might have, only exists NOW. The reason it overrides any deterministic view of past and future is that all we have is NOW.

That is true. For once you got it right.

 

[pood]

What are you even talking about? Your question isn't necessary for proof of determinism. You off on a tangent!

This is the same question asked of DBT, who has never specifically answered: Does he, or does he not, agree with fellow hard determinist Jerry Coyne that the jazz composer’s piece was determined in advance of him composing it?

I have answered the question many times. Think about how determinism is defined. Consider your endorsement of constant conjunction, where event A must inevitably lead to events B, C, etc.

Your wording is loaded.

Music cannot composed before the composer is born and learns music and composes a score. And given your terms, what the composer writes inevitably follows from their life experience and proclivities and ability.

Think about the implications of constant conjunction.

OK. So you disagree with fellow hard determinist Jerry Coyne. Hard determinism has become schismatic!

 

[peacegirl]

What are you even talking about? Your question isn't necessary for proof of determinism. You off on a tangent!

This is the same question asked of DBT, who has never specifically answered: Does he, or does he not, agree with fellow hard determinist Jerry Coyne that the jazz composer’s piece was determined in advance of him composing it?

I have answered the question many times. Think about how determinism is defined. Consider your endorsement of constant conjunction, where event A must inevitably lead to events B, C, etc.

Your wording is loaded.

Music cannot composed before the composer is born and learns music and composes a score. And given your terms, what the composer writes inevitably follows from their life experience and proclivities and ability.

Think about the implications of constant conjunction.

OK. So you disagree with fellow hard determinist Jerry Coyne. Hard determinism has become schismatic!

Why are you trying to confuse everyone with your play on words Pood? DBT was very clear as to what he meant by outer force or coercion and inner necessity, which is just as important if not more. Compatiblists conveniently leave this out. There will be no meeting of the minds because of definition only. Doing something of one's own accord doesn't give a person free will. When people use the term "free will" to mean anything other than "could have done otherwise" given the same exact conditions, they are using the term to mean something that was not intended in this debate. You can argue that we have free will because we are not rocks rolling down a hill, but this doesn't mean we have free will just because we get to think, ruminate, and then decide. This is all part of the deterministic stream. Neither does it change the fact that every moment we live, we cannot move against our nature which is away from dissatisfaction to greater satisfaction. You have yet to prove me wrong. All you keep saying is that whatever you choose is your preference so it's circular. No, it isn't, and even if whatever you choose is tautological, it doesn't make it trivially true. Choosing between randomly shooting someone (choice A) and not shooting someone (choice B), gives you no free choice (choice B) at all if you don't want to shoot this person. IOW, if it is impossible to shoot someone under the present conditions (choice A), you are not free to choose B (not to shoot). The choice of A or B is not either/or (which would mean you could shoot or not shoot, hence free will) and it certainly isn't trivial. This is an extreme example to show that when meaningful differences are present, especially ones that involve hurt, without any justification to shoot this person, you are compelled to choose B (yes, compelled, of your own free will which only means "because you want to" and can be used colloquially without contradiction) thus pushing you in this particular direction, completely beyond your control.

Agency, choice, deliberation, decision-making, alternatives, options, responsibility are all part of the deterministic process. Responsibility for an action isn't removed when we were the ones that ran the light and killed two children. But this does not mean we are morally responsible when we could not have done otherwise. This has been the elephant in the room for centuries without any resolution. The two-sided equation solves this problem and prevents the act, which you have failed to understand. "Free will" in a deterministic system is an effort to try to reconcile the two opposite ideologies but it fails. Free will doesn't fit in this process anywhere. It's a realistic mirage. Determinism (not hard or soft; manmade constructs that are causing confusion) does not mean we don't get to deliberate. How many times has DBT said that deliberation is part of the means and mechanisms of the internal process of making decisions. We are not meat robots, but we do follow the laws of our nature which constrain what options we will ultimately decide upon. The word choice is misleading because it makes it appear that we really can choose either/or, which is why DBT doesn't use the term.

 

[DBT]

You can't be a compatibilist, while at the same time assert that alternate actions

Yet again this comes from failing to understand "alternate actions". There is an action, an alternative of "what may happen somewhere in the universe" to your left... And another to your right.

These are validly "alternatives".

This error of yours comes from an inability to properly abstract high dimensional spaces, and is a math error.

Why do you continue to trot out that fallacy? That different things can and do happen within the system doesn't mean that any one of these different events had the possibility of being different. Where each and every event must happen as determined,

That different things happen all around us is not the point.

Again;

''Having made my choice or decision and acted upon it, could I have chosen otherwise or not? [. . . ] Here the [compatibilist], hoping to surrender nothing and yet to avoid the problem im-plied in the question, bids us not to ask it; the question itself, he announces, is without meaning. For to say that I could have done otherwise, he says, means only that I would have done otherwise, if those inner states that determined my action had been different; if, that is, I had decided or chosen differently.

To ask, accordingly, whether I could have chosen or decided differently is only to ask whether, had I decided to decide differently, or chosen to choose differently, or willed to will differently, I would have decided or chosen or willed differently. And this, of course, is unintelligible nonsense [. . . ] But it is not nonsense to ask whether the cause of my actions my own inner choices, decisions, and desires are themselves caused.

And of course, they are, if determinism is true, for on that thesis everything is caused and determined. And if they are, then we cannot avoid concluding that, given the causal conditions of those inner states, I could not have decided, willed, chosen, or desired other than I, in fact, did, for this is a logical consequence of the very definition of determinism. Of course, we can still say that, if the causes of those inner states, whatever they were, had been different, then their effects, those inner states themselves, would have been different, and that in this hypothetical sense I could have decided, chosen, willed, or desired differently but that only pushes our problem back still another step [Italics added].

For we will then want to know whether the causes of those inner states were within my control, and so on ad infinitum. We are, at each step, permitted to say could have been otherwise, only in a provision sense provided, that is, that something else had been different but must then retract it and replace it with could not have been otherwise as soon as we discover, as we must at each step, that whatever would have to have been different could not have been different (Taylor, 1992: 45-46).''

 

[DBT]

What are you even talking about? Your question isn't necessary for proof of determinism. You off on a tangent!

This is the same question asked of DBT, who has never specifically answered: Does he, or does he not, agree with fellow hard determinist Jerry Coyne that the jazz composer’s piece was determined in advance of him composing it?

I have answered the question many times. Think about how determinism is defined. Consider your endorsement of constant conjunction, where event A must inevitably lead to events B, C, etc.

Your wording is loaded.

Music cannot composed before the composer is born and learns music and composes a score. And given your terms, what the composer writes inevitably follows from their life experience and proclivities and ability.

Think about the implications of constant conjunction.

OK. So you disagree with fellow hard determinist Jerry Coyne. Hard determinism has become schismatic!

I was pointing to your loaded wording and the excluded middle fallacy. Music is not written before there is a composer who sets about writing music.

And of course, given the terms of your definition of determinism, what is written must be written as determined.

Nor is determinism hard or soft, it is determinism.

If you as a compatibilist accept determinism as you define it to be, you must accept that whatever happens, whatever music is written, is inevitable....and that my objection is not about the terms, but your wording.

 

[Elixir]

the jazz composer’s piece was determined in advance of him composing it?

Some things had to happen or not happen for him to compose it. Some of those things could be determined to have been determinable - in retrospect. Such as, if a meteorite fragment the size of a grapefruit had struck a few feet from where the composer was composing, while he was composing, the finished piece might be very different from how it might have been if that meteorite was a nanometer from its actual location when it was some millions of miles away. It could have gone unnoticed and buried in the ground miles away, or hit him. The point where the fragment ultimately impacts is not subject to free will, regardless of how it effects the jazz piece's existence and/or qualities - or not.

OTOH. I did have an epiphany when I was about 12, running down a hill... mid stride, in the air and time seemed to stop, crushed by an instantaneous realization that the thing I thought of as "me" was nothing more or less than the sum total accumulation of all of my own desires over my entire existence. The clarity with which I experienced that is too overwhelming to even try to replicate or forget, and too powerful for me to dismiss or argue internally even more than 60 years later.
So perhaps it's turtles all the way down and they are all... us and our "free will".

 

[aupmanyav]

OP: "Reality goes beyond 'physics' and more .."

Reality goes beyond religion and philosophy too.

 

[Jarhyn]

Why do you continue to trot out that fallacy? That different things can and do happen within the system doesn't mean that any one of these different events had the possibility of being different.

Every one of those things is observed amid the actuality of everything else in the system being different.

As I said if an offset on the dimension of in/out is acceptable to the notion of alternaltity and offset on the dimension of x, y or z, however you assign them, must be equally sufficient for alternality. This belief that it is fallacious at all comes from shocking deficiencies in your math education.

 

[Jarhyn]

what is written must be written as determined.

Music is not written before there is a composer who sets about writing music.

Take your pick. It's either been determined already (and thus already written) or it is determined in and by the process of the writing.

"Being determined" requires the execution of the process. The whole process. No parts can be left out... Including the parts where the action is necessary for the writing.

 

[Michael S. Pearl]

what is written must be written as determined.

Music is not written before there is a composer who sets about writing music.

Take your pick. It's either been determined already (and thus already written) or it is determined in and by the process of the writing.

"Being determined" requires the execution of the process. The whole process. No parts can be left out... Including the parts where the action is necessary for the writing.

From the perspective of determinism, once given whatever are the conditions sufficient for the obtaining of determinism (for all to be henceforth always determined), all is everywhere and everywhen determined, but each aspect is actualized at some particular instance/time. That is to say that the writing was determined previous to the writing being actualized/being done.

 

[Elixir]

What good is determinism when all the determining factors are unknowable?
What good is free will if it can be overridden by deterministic events?

 

[steve_bank]

What good is determinism when all the determining factors are unknowable?
What good is free will if it can be overridden by deterministic events?

An old saying I heard. Before enlightenment get up and go to work. After enlightenment get up and go to work. There are different versions.

As you said given it is not knowable, it is irrelevant. One gets up and brushes one's teeth in the morning regardless.

From a Buddhist view in the end enlightenment can be just another mind created illusion. Philosophical determinism and free will for lack of a better word are illusions.

 

[pood]

Although it has been correctly noted that compatibilism makes no reference to quantum mechanics, the funny thing is that determinism is false. In his radical final theory, Steven Hawking proposes that the entire universe is and always has been entirely quantum mechanics indeterministic.

 

[Michael S. Pearl]

Although it has been correctly noted that compatibilism makes no reference to quantum mechanics, the funny thing is that determinism is false. In his radical final theory, Steven Hawking proposes that the entire universe is and always has been entirely quantum mechanics indeterministic.

I am glad to hear that Hawking moved away from that non-sense that he and Hartle concocted. However, I do not know what the universe being "quantum mechanics indeterministic" would do for him. After all, isn't quantum mechanics supposed to be probabilistically deterministic despite being indeterministic? Of course, there are recognized problems/controversies when it comes to probabilities. For example, when Hans Reichenbach endeavored to statistically derive/associate time directionality from/with entropy (ugh), he acknowledged that "if the universe is spatially infinite ... the probabilities of its states [can]not be defined". The desire for utter macro-determinateness (and determinism) is one thing; a predictability sufficient for usefulness even at the quantum level is something else all together. Science (as distinguished from science-ism or scientism) has no need of determinism, although some people seem to have such a frankly extra-scientific predilection for an assortment of reasons (some being more understandable than others despite the fact that determinism never does cohere with the experience of human being). Along with appreciating science as a human enterprise rather than "a God’s-eye view", it is good advice to be always cognizant that science is "never decoupled from us", from our perspectives, from the assumptions we inherit, from what we assume along the way. In a manner of speaking, the science of science (undoubtedly an aspect of philosophy) is the ongoing investigation of how humans (can) go about solving perceived problems.

 

[Jarhyn]

all is everywhere and everywhen determined

No, it isn't, it's exactly every there and every then determined, exactly where it is.

You are laying out the block still in some 4d+ *euclidean space* that's what we are talking about.

There are still going to be coordinates and only at those coordinates is determined any exact thing. You can find other things by navigating over some super-time added to the euclidean space, but they still aren't "determined" everywhere and everywhen, because the coordinates of determination are strictly different.

You cannot express the idea you wish without expressing some truth of a nonsense statement. It's arising from a not-even-wrong conception of math and language.

You would have to see the entire universe as a singularity, described not by any point but by a broad function, and offering zero information about any given event inside this infinite list of events... And then you literally don't know the future of any specific point without processing the function to that point.

Fuck I wish I could access someone who could help me arrange my thoughts on this.

Like, there's this thing involving einsteins tilings and decidability of location and relativity and finite/infinite choice that have been tumbling about in my head as an analog to some things about field theory.

Einstein tilings are interesting because it has been proven that *you can fill an infinite euclidean 2d space with them*, that the field produced *has local repetitions, but not global ones*.

Now, if you could select any point at random from this field, and knew only that it was generated an infinite time ago by some grand unifying theory of *tile placement*, you wouldn't be able to know where you were, even if you successfully identified a place that looks like "the known origin".

No matter what, given a stipulation that you didn't start at that placement center and are not somehow made aware of it, you could never as an ant on this surface find it with 100% certainty, since all extant finite local groups repeat infinitely in this field: infinite parts look like the center but slightly different at one point and then completely different from thereon out and it is a *deterministic* pattern with a fixed "block" shape, in an easily handled set of two dimensions for now, albeit we need three to do the mental handling.

Now that we have a deterministic system of initial conditions that we can use to jumpstart a "flatland" simulation, we pick a spot at random, of this infinite space, and the providing a set of rules for the evolution of what happens at each coordinate in the field.

Every time step on this system, the next tile is revealed, doing a clockwise spiral *from each tile*, as that tile was on the beginning step, and each preceding tile as it was on the step preceding, where the differences in their rotation and distance influence some manner of inflection, and then the system in that step has the rotations changed based on this function and then the whole system is forced into the closest possible conformation to the result. All sorts of wacky shit ensues; "ties" are broken by a subtle asymmetry.

Imagine that in every frame the whole structure does manage to come back together in a new orientation.

In this way, we have created a sort of deterministic hat-verse where we have exactly one fewer spatial dimensions to worry about. We can abstract away whatever messy rules resolve the *step* to a new arrangement.

There is no preferred reference frame even if there is a secret zero where you know what every tile is going to look like before it's placed, so long as you know you are there. That still doesn't even tell you any faster than the action of the system itself what relationships all the other tiles are seeing until you work it out.

"Working it out", though is just replicating the action of the machine, and if you were to mess with the machine and say to some largescale cellular automata of flatland that "this tile over here is going to be rotated 'this way', so that's going to influence the events there in 'this other way'" in some way that involves getting to the target, Well, now I've twisted the tiles and those twists are going to influence and foul up the result as those are much more influential to the final tile twisting than the future prediction.

In flatland, we see that the principle of alternative possibilities merely manifests as the axiom of finite choice, and that these are one in the same concept.

 

[Michael S. Pearl]

No, it isn't, it's exactly every there and every then determined, exactly where it is.

First of all, you are begging the question relative to the determinist perspective. The determinist viewpoint is not (well, should not be - even by determinists) asserted as indubitably actually true; it can, however, be regarded as possibly true. Secondly, if someone holds that occurrences are not-determined until they become actual, then that person is in the position of asserting that determinism is (possibly) false. If a person holds that determinism is not actually the case while self-deeming as a compatibilist, then the question becomes: What is supposed to be compatible with what? Compatibilism is most commonly rendered in terms of free will being compatible with determinism. But to deny determinism is to deny compatibilism. And the modal fallacy issue is not relevant here, because logical possibilities are not necessarily (meta)physical possibilities. Furthermore, when a logical possibility happens to be a relevant (meta)physical possibility, then that simply speaks against the determinism possibility. This is all a matter of perfectly coherent language. This is perfectly well conceived language. And that is an actual truth.

 

[peacegirl]

Although it has been correctly noted that compatibilism makes no reference to quantum mechanics, the funny thing is that determinism is false. In his radical final theory, Steven Hawking proposes that the entire universe is and always has been entirely quantum mechanics indeterministic.

And Einstein was a determinist. Why do you always appeal to authority? I guess when all else fails it's an easy fallback.

I am a determinist. As such, I do not believe in free will. The Jews believe in free will. They believe that man shapes his own life. I reject that doctrine philosophically. In that respect I am not a Jew… I believe with Schopenhauer: We can do what we wish, but we can only wish what we must. Practically, I am, nevertheless, compelled to act is 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.

When asked about any personal responsibility for his own staggering achievements, he points a steadfast finger at the nonexistence of free will:

I claim credit for nothing. Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human being, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to an invisible tune, intoned in the distance by a mysterious player.

Einstein on Free Will and the Power of the Imagination

“Human being, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to an invisible tune, intoned in the distance by a mysterious player.”

www.themarginalian.org

 

[Jarhyn]

@Michael S. Pearl

See my previous post, especially the edit about flatland.

It is math-heavy, and discusses this in terms of really obscure topics.