“Reality Goes Beyond Physics,” and more

[DBT]

And the irony of you praising DBT as a “warrior for truth,” in your typical melodramatic and overblown fashion, is that your author’s position on why we have no free will and DBT’s position on the same subject actually have nothing to do with each other. If you actually understood your author’s work, you would know this, but you have never understood what he was saying, which is why you can never explain it. And, beyond the determinism/free will thing, if you actually understood how utterly ludicrous his claims about light and sight are, you would cringe with embarrassment.

I don't support claims that are made in the book, light at the eye/instant vision, etc. I argue for incompatibilism and nothing else.

 

[Jarhyn]

I gave a definition of determinism

All later states being determined by earlier states neither implies a specific beginning, a finite beginning, nor a "random" beginning.

Any other claim is not "determinism" but some claim some idiot makes *about* determinism.

Determinism is exactly "each later state is determined fully through the resolution of the preceding state."

Something happens to your left.

It's different from what happens to your right.

These are alternate possibilities real and standing there before you.

 

[pood]

Meanwhile, today at his blog, Jerry Coyne is attacking a perfectly reasonable (critical) review of Sapolsky’s book claiming we have no free will (there is a link to the whole review) while happily repeating the tale about how he was “menaced” by a jazz musician after intimating that his piece was determined in advance of his writing it. Funnily enough, Jerry never tells WHO or WHAT wrote it, and HOW, if not the musician himself. Maybe DBT will get around to telling us, if he agrees with fellow hard determinist Jerry Coyne.

 

[pood]

Since Jerry Coyne did a review of a review of Sapolsky’s book, I’m going to do a review of his review of the book, though over a series of posts. This is the first one.

But Sapolsky’s book has gotten some negative reviews, and I should have realized that writing about determinism will immediately get people’s hackles up, because their feeling of having free will (and I’ll be talking here about libertarian “you-could-have-chosen-otherwise” free will) is so strong that they can brook no determinism.

Two things about this.

First, it’s ad hom right out of the box. I suppose there may indeed be some people who oppose hard determinism because it “gets their hackles up,” but the overwhelming majority of philosophers and others who disagree with hard determinism offer arguments and evidence for their position, not a display of “hackles.” It should be noted further that most academic philosophers are compatibilists.

Now notice Coyne says he will be talking about libertarian as opposed to compatibilist free will. Why is that, exactly? But never mind, the real point I wanted to make is this: the “could-have-chosen-otherwise” trope is a bit of misdirection, if not a red herring. Not all compatibilists have a totally consistent position, and many if not most will accept that compatibilism means you “could not have done otherwise” under the exact same circumstances. I do not agree with this. I think that, under identical circumstances, you could indeed have done otherwise, but did not, because you did not want to. And I have already explained how this works in modal logic, which is generally (unfortunately) ignored in these sorts of debates, including by Coyne and the writer he is reviewing. In any event, libertarianism isn’t all about “could have done otherwise,” but rather, in its strongest version, “agent-causal libertarianism” in which one’s current act is wholly decoupled from all antecedents, which of course the compatiblist does not endorse. But see the Strong Free Will Theorem for more on this form of libertarianism.

I’ve already recounted how I was menaced by a a jazz musician for intimating that is “extemporaneous” solos were determined before he ever played them …

Yes, you have. But you have never explained, if the solos were determined before he ever played them, who, or what, did that, and how? The central problem here is that hard determinism conflates determinism with pre-determinism, whereas the correct formulation is that events and effects are determined at the time of causation — in the case of the jazz musician, determined by a network of cause and effects, including feedback loops, in his brain, based, obviously, on antecedents including upbringing and genetic makeup. Sapolsky is certainly right about that, but draws a wrong conclusion.

More later.

 

[Jarhyn]

Meanwhile, today at his blog, Jerry Coyne is attacking a perfectly reasonable (critical) review of Sapolsky’s book claiming we have no free will (there is a link to the whole review) while happily repeating the tale about how he was “menaced” by a jazz musician after intimating that his piece was determined in advance of his writing it. Funnily enough, Jerry never tells WHO or WHAT wrote it, and HOW, if not the musician himself. Maybe DBT will get around to telling us, if he agrees with fellow hard determinist Jerry Coyne.

I just find it so disappointing how few people understand that "determined in advance" is not strictly "determinism" as it is "fatalism" and that the only way something is ever determined is by the process itself.

You can make an educated guess, by looking at the properties of the tableau before you. You can understand the freedoms of the world, and know what things are going to do, as long as those properties do not shift.

But this isn't actually pre-determining the future, it is only determining the present.You can even determine when something is lumbering unstoppably towards some outcome because there is no energy with which to direct a response. But this itself still does not pre-determine the outcome. The outcome is determined exactly by that action, given these physical laws.

You can only know the momentum of something if it continues to not be acted upon by an outside force, and there are always outside forces because of the infinity of scope.

Agents are important and significant because they can, via internal forces, to oppose any external forces with less energy to them than the stored amount, and that they use this to occupy and internalize greater force differentials.

These structures end up acting "responsibly" with respect to the fact that they self-regulate to accomplish this.

 

[DBT]

I gave a definition of determinism

All later states being determined by earlier states neither implies a specific beginning, a finite beginning, nor a "random" beginning.

Determinism, as it is defined, does specify initial conditions.

Determinism is true of the world if and only if, given a specified way things are at a time t, the way things go thereafter is fixed as a matter of natural law.

Something happens to your left.

It's different from what happens to your right.

These are alternate possibilities real and standing there before you.

That is where you go wrong.

If determinism is true, that different things happen all around us does not mean that any one of these events had the possibility of being different, or that the person making the decision and carrying out the action could have done something else, and that is the point of the no choice principle.

That different people do different things is irrelevant, that different things happen within a complex system is irrelevant to the point that nothing could have been different.

 

[Michael S. Pearl]

... many [compatibilists] if not most will accept that compatibilism means you “could not have done otherwise” under the exact same circumstances. I do not agree with this. I think that, under identical circumstances, you could indeed have done otherwise, but did not, because you did not want to. And I have already explained how this works in modal logic ...

Do those "exact same circumstances" include what you want? If not, then they are clearly not the exact same circumstances. On the other hand, "exact same circumstances" can be intended to refer to the context immediately prior to the hypothetical wanting and its becoming actual. And we are right back to the question: Do you think there is ever actual (meta)physical indeterminateness with regards to what you can/do actualize? Do you think there is ever actual (meta)physical indeterminateness with regards to what you want? If there is no such indeterminateness with regards to what you want, then on what basis is it claimed that you could have done/do/will do otherwise?

With regards to modal logic, is a modal logic possibility always a (meta)physical possibility (and therefore a reference to an actual (meta)physical indeterminate situation)? If not, then how is modal logic supposed to be somehow dispositive in a (meta)physical context which itself is described/discussed in terms of WILL rather than MUST?

If modal logic does not track the (meta)physical context, then that modal logic is, at best, relevant only to the semantics of WILL being more widely appropriate than MUST (even though, with charity, the MUST is easily understood in terms of WILL).

 

[Jarhyn]

Determinism does specify initial conditions

No, it doesn't, and the axiom of choice is the whole reason it absolutely cannot.

There is no sensibility in the very concept of a preferred reference frame, and it's undecidable "where to start".

If the universe is normal and lacks zero property, which is to say that it can contains all configurations possible at some moment somewhere inside it at some point in time and space, and that the very *concept* of a specific initial condition is nonsensical. If you're somewhere inside it, if you already have a location, you can say, "the starting condition HERE was specifically _____", but you can't say "the starting condition was determined" because it's "literally all starting conditions".

Infinity is weird, especially when it goes in "both" directions. Determinism describes process, not conditions.

I don't know how to explain this to you any better. You would need to actually learn and apply the concept of determinism, which best I can tell you never ever actually have.

The operating system of a 787 has a deterministic boot sequence.

The operating system of a TAILS OS has a deterministic boot sequence.

Determinism says nothing about which operating system is booting where, only what happens when they do. It is a discussion of operation, not conditions.

 

[Jarhyn]

Part of the infinite variance of the universe is the concept of the quasi-crystal and "hat/turtle" shapes.

The math has been done which indicates that the universe actually allows matter to form shape constructions and translations of structure which go on infinitely, which have repeated instances of finite structures, but which themselves are irregular. Quasi-regular, if you will.

These are not amorphous, however, in that they have mathematical structure, for all they lack "perfect cyclic repetition".

This infinitude of variance is important to note, because it means that the universe can behave likewise with infinite variance at its lowest, and highest, levels.

At the beginning of our understanding of physics, the universe was an amorphous plasma containing a very densely packed mixture of all the fundamental particles, and this itself is, at least in my mind, much like the hat field... Just packed in there irregular and infinite like "hats".

Honestly, this could also possibly be deterministic... After all, you can start with a "hat 0" and place hats in a fixed way out to infinity.

If you landed in some infinitely deep region of this field, you would never be able to know where the 0 of it is; an unimaginably large but finite region may look like an unimaginably large but finite region and unless you had literally infinite ime to count you would never know the difference!

This is both deterministic AND infinite: any structure you find in that field, you will find an infinite number more times, but always with a different global context.

Hell, there might be some mathematical relationship between irregular monotiles/monostructures, quasi crystals, and the initial condition of the universe.

If there is, though, we return to this concept of finite choice in the infinitude of it, however: all finite starting conditions would be repeated infinitely but always with a slightly different global context.

There would be infinite versions of earth which only *tomorrow* would differentiate because of something *very* far away being *slightly* different and setting some badly-engineered chaotic system down a slightly different path at a point of near-perfect but unstable balance... And this would necessarily be true in a flat 3d+t universe.

The point here being that denying alternative possibilities because "determinism" is an abject failure to understand "determinism".

 

[DBT]

Determinism does specify initial conditions

No, it doesn't, and the axiom of choice is the whole reason it absolutely cannot.

There is no sensibility in the very concept of a preferred reference frame, and it's undecidable "where to start".

Well, you must have your own special definition of determinism.

What Does Deterministic System Mean?
''A deterministic system is a system in which a given initial state or condition will always produce the same results. There is no randomness or variation in the ways that inputs get delivered as outputs.''

If the universe is normal and lacks zero property, which is to say that it can contains all configurations possible at some moment somewhere inside it at some point in time and space, and that the very *concept* of a specific initial condition is nonsensical. If you're somewhere inside it, if you already have a location, you can say, "the starting condition HERE was specifically _____", but you can't say "the starting condition was determined" because it's "literally all starting conditions".

Infinity is weird, especially when it goes in "both" directions. Determinism describes process, not conditions.

Determinism describes both the process and the condition of the system as it evolves from past to present and future states of the system.


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

I don't know how to explain this to you any better. You would need to actually learn and apply the concept of determinism, which best I can tell you never ever actually have.

What you have explained is wrong. The reasons are outlined above.

The operating system of a 787 has a deterministic boot sequence.

The operating system of a TAILS OS has a deterministic boot sequence.

Determinism says nothing about which operating system is booting where, only what happens when they do. It is a discussion of operation, not conditions.

If what the OS does is deterministic, it follows that the operating system is booting deterministically. Unless you are proposing randomness or probability at work in what you say is a deterministic system?

 

[steve_bank]

I don't think philosophical determinism and deterministic systems are necessarily the same thing.

From the last systems book I had the top level category of systems is chaotic. Deterministic and probabilistic or stochastic are special cases of chaotic.

A deterministic equation is velocity = distance/time. Plug in any two values and the third variable is completely defined.

Philosophical determinism is about whether or not we have free choice or are our lives completely predetermined. Meaning of life and purpose.

The original Law And Order crime show ttouched on it. If people are genetically predisposed to criminal behavior without responsibility for actions then the legal system goes out the widow.

We see it in medical reporting. Some people may be genetically predisposed to addiction and depression.

The Winnows OS is asynchronous, it responds to inputs in any order at any time. O(tv ap[[-ers probabilistic or stochastic There can be international randomness in the system.

The C++ random library has a 'random device'. It derives random numbers from processes in the OS. It is considered a non deterministic random number generator as compared to a deterministic pseudo random number generators. In a pseudo random numberr generator given a starting point seed the following sequence of numbers is deterministically known.

Pseudo random number generators statistically appear random, but are dt6erminisc.

So, locally over the short period of our lives it can seem like we have free will and choice, but in the long run are deterministic.

 

[Jarhyn]

in which a given initial state or condition

There, in your very own words. The initial condition is *given*. Which means that... Deterministic action happens after it is *given* and is entirely agnostic to *how* it is given.

And no, Steve, determinism is no more than "the universe functions deterministically".

It is always *given* a start condition.

 

[pood]

More on Jerry Coyne’s review. Coyne writes:

But of all the reviews I’ve read of Sapolsky’s book, by far the worst just appeared in what was once a great venue, the New York Review of Books. (It went downhill fast when its wonderful editor Robert B. Silvers died in 2017.)

So now we have poisoning the well in addition to the earlier ad hom.

The review is free to access (also archived here), and you can read by clicking on the headline below. It shows no understanding of the free-will controversy, or of science itself, and offers no alternative to determinism (it has to be some magical nonphysical agent that can affect material objects), though I suspect the author, because of her frequent references to God and theology, might believe that free will has a goddy supernatural origin. (Even if it doesn’t, libertarian free will has to rely on something supernatural.)

The above is so confused it’s breathtaking. First, it’s Coyne who doesn’t understand the controversy, because he limits the scope of the debate to hard determinism vs. libertarianism, both incompatibilist positions, without even addressing (or possibly not understanding) the compatibilist position. Second, with perhaps one small exception, the author seems to understand science, or at least the history of science, quite well. Third, the author does not have to offer an alternative to determinism — she is offering a rebuttal to Sapolsky’s claim of biological determinism, which is not even the same as Coyne’s hard determinism, something Coyne does not seem to recognize. Fourth, when he mentions his idea that the author might believe that free will has a “goddy supernatural origin,” he has comprehensively misunderstood the context in which the author, an atheist, brings up God and theology, as I will explain later.

Although I’m usually loath to dwell on credentials …

Which won’t stop you from doing so this time, and in so doing once again commit the ad hom fallacy as well as again the fallacy of poisoning the well.

… a historian, even of biology, is not the person to review Sapolsky’s book. Perhaps a philosopher or a neurologist, but I can explain the pervasive awfulness of Riskin’s review only by appealing to massive ignorance of the topic.

The above is really rich. Riskin is not qualified to review Sapolsky’s book, but Coyne, who in fact did review the book when it came out in addition to this review of Riskin’s review, is? How is that supposed to work? Is Coyne a neurologist? No, he is not. Is he a philosopher? No, he most definitely is not. So what privileges him to review Sapolsky’s book over Riskin? Nothing. In any event, it is not necessary for one to be a neurologist, a biologist, or even a philosopher to have an informed opinion on this subject, provided one is inclined to put in the needed reading and thinking about it. As Michael Pearl has noted, it is possible for anyone to meaningfully philosophize without being strictly a philosopher in the credentialed academic sense, in the same way that one can think scientifically without a degree in science.

More later.

 

[pood]

Coyne writes:

Ignorance of science. Riskin doesn’t realize that getting evidence for phenomena (e.g., evolution) is very often a step-by step-process: you have an initial hypothesis, and then you either reinforce or reduce the likelihood of its being true with new data.

How does she not realize this? Coyne never says, he just makes an unevidenced accusation.

This is a Bayesian approach, though often it’s implicit rather than specified using Bayes’s theorem. You don’t “prove” determinism or free will, you simply gather evidence that makes one of them more likely.

Right, the author does say that Sapolsky fails to “prove” his case against free will, so perhaps (supposing uncharitably) she thinks science “proves” stuff beyond any doubt whatsoever, and if so that would be wrong, but still and all it is an uncharitable reading of what she wrote, because Sapolsky certainly at the very least implied that he had proved his case, and she is pointing out that he did not.

I would note that determinism should have high priors simply because our brains and bodies and environments, the source of our behaviors, affect our behaviors materially–usually through neuronal wiring. (That’s why Sapolsky concentrates so much on neurons.) And material objects universally obey the laws of physics.

First, in the above, Coyne slips up when he conflates determinism with hard determinism, when usually he is careful to append the “hard” modifier to his own brand of determinism. Remember, the compatibilist (whose position Coyne refuses even to entertain) does not deny determinism.

Second, he overlooks Sapolsky’s demand that in order for us to have free will, we should demonstrate free will in an neuron, which is as confused as saying that to demonstrate that water is wet, we should demonstrate wetness in water molecules. .

Third, compatiblist free will (which Coyne refuses to consider for whatever reason) has high priors as well, and as a biologist Coyne ought to know this. The biggest “high prior’ of all is that brains evolved to weigh competing options and make informed choices. If we really have no choice in what we do, what would be the selective advantage in complex brains that consume vast energetic resources which could be better allocated to simpler stuff like claws and muscles? A world of hard determinism would seem better suited to evolving P-zombies at best.

Fourth, what does he mean by “material objects universally obey the laws of physics”? This is a crucial issue, especially for the neo-Humean compatibilist, and it also goes to Riskin’s invocation of God and theology in the discussion, which, again, I will more fully analyze later. The initial point here, as has been discussed by Norman Swartz and others, is that when anyone says material objects universally “obey” the “laws” of physics, this claim is a hangover from theology — the idea that God, the law giver, gave “laws” that “govern” the world. A more naturalistic take on this (and remember, Coyne is a naturalist) is that there are no laws of physics at all, but rather mathematical descriptions of universal regularities that we wrongly label as coercive laws.

Riskin WANTS determinism to be proved …

Ad hom.

More later. But, I would say that thus far, Coyne is doing really, really badly. His philosophical shortcomings, at the least, are glaringly obvious.

 

[peacegirl]

Since Jerry Coyne did a review of a review of Sapolsky’s book, I’m going to do a review of his review of the book, though over a series of posts. This is the first one.

But Sapolsky’s book has gotten some negative reviews, and I should have realized that writing about determinism will immediately get people’s hackles up, because their feeling of having free will (and I’ll be talking here about libertarian “you-could-have-chosen-otherwise” free will) is so strong that they can brook no determinism.

Two things about this.

First, it’s ad hom right out of the box. I suppose there may indeed be some people who oppose hard determinism because it “gets their hackles up,” but the overwhelming majority of philosophers and others who disagree with hard determinism offer arguments and evidence for their position, not a display of “hackles.” It should be noted further that most academic philosophers are compatibilists.

Why do you need to appeal to popularity? The majority of the world believes in free will. If popularity had anything to do with the truth, free will would win. But it is wrong, hence this whole idea that "most academic philosophers are compatibilists" proves absolutely nothing.

Now notice Coyne says he will be talking about libertarian as opposed to compatibilist free will. Why is that, exactly? But never mind, the real point I wanted to make is this: the “could-have-chosen-otherwise” trope is a bit of misdirection, if not a red herring. Not all compatibilists have a totally consistent position, and many if not most will accept that compatibilism means you “could not have done otherwise” under the exact same circumstances. I do not agree with this. I think that, under identical circumstances, you could indeed have done otherwise, but did not, because you did not want to.

That's exactly what makes you unable to have done otherwise.

Decline and Fall of All Evil:

We are not interested in opinions and theories regardless of where they originate, just in the truth, so let’s proceed to the next step and prove conclusively, beyond a shadow of doubt, that what we do of our own free will (of our own desire because we want to) is done absolutely and positively, not of our own free will. Remember, by proving that determinism, as the opposite of free will, is true, we also establish undeniable proof that free will is false.”

And I have already explained how this works in modal logic, which is generally (unfortunately) ignored in these sorts of debates, including by Coyne and the writer he is reviewing. In any event, libertarianism isn’t all about “could have done otherwise,” but rather, in its strongest version, “agent-causal libertarianism” in which one’s current act is wholly decoupled from all antecedents, which of course the compatiblist does not endorse. But see the Strong Free Will Theorem for more on this form of libertarianism.

I’ve already recounted how I was menaced by a a jazz musician for intimating that is “extemporaneous” solos were determined before he ever played them …

Yes, you have. But you have never explained, if the solos were determined before he ever played them, who, or what, did that, and how? The central problem here is that hard determinism conflates determinism with pre-determinism, whereas the correct formulation is that events and effects are determined at the time of causation — in the case of the jazz musician, determined by a network of cause and effects, including feedback loops, in his brain, based, obviously, on antecedents including upbringing and genetic makeup. Sapolsky is certainly right about that, but draws a wrong conclusion.

More later.

Determinism implies that we are predetermined to do what we do, and there is no deviation from that. The time of causation is only a snapshot of one moment that does not include the precipitating factors. The jazz player is just following his "meant to be" position in life which are comprised of his genetics and environment. No surprises here. Determinism does not mean that the Big Bang caused him to be a musician. You are leaving out all of the events leading up to the here and now. Why are you neglecting this? Sapolsky may be incorrect in some of his conclusions, but he is much closer to the truth than any compatibilist.

 

[Michael S. Pearl]

A more naturalistic take on this (and remember, Coyne is a naturalist) is that there are no laws of physics at all, but rather mathematical descriptions of universal regularities that we wrongly label as coercive laws.

One interesting tangent regards a common tendency to regard mathematicized physical descriptions as if they are assuredly superior to other manners of description (e.g., verbal) regarding regularities that get referred to as laws of physics.

 

[pood]

More:

Riskin WANTS determinism to be proved …

Again, ad hom, because even if true, irrelevant. And the truth is the claim is not in evidence anyway. To see why this is an irrelevant ad hom fallacy, simply turn it around and say: “Jerry Coyne thinks hard determinism is true because he WANTS it to be true.” Would Coyne not object to that? Of course he would, and justifiably so, because he would point out that he has offered evidence and arguments for his position, which is true, feeble and misinformed though they are.

This is the whole essence of the ad hom fallacy: it not an insult, as some wrongly suppose, but rather to claim that someone is arguing for or against some proposition because of some particular characteristic or motivation of that person.

We see ad hom again and again from peacegirl, for instance, who repeatedly says — just to take one example — that those of us who reject her author’s claims about light and sight do so because those claims “make us angry” or “threaten our world views,” whereas the real reason we reject them is that those claims are demonstrably wrong and idiotic, and have been so demonstrated many times.

… and says that Sapolsky doesn’t do it. But I say she’s put the bar too high, that Sapolsky makes a good case and that, combined with the presupposition that true libertarian free will must involve forces that we don’t know about—while the laws of physics appear to apply universally—should put Riskin on the defensive (which she is).

Again, what happened to compatibilism? Why is the focus on contra-causal free will? More, has Coyne considered that his “presuppositions” about libertarianism could be false? I’m not defending libertarianism, but there are arguments for it that don’t involve forces we don’t know about. Again, for one example, see the Strong Free Will theorem. Finally, claiming that Riskin is “on the defensive” is a tendentious opinion not justified by anything that I can see in Riskin’s text, either stylistically or substantively.

Here, Coyne quotes Riskin quoting Sapolsky:

Not only are we “not captains of our ships,” he writes, “our ships never had captains. Fuck. That really blows.” (This gives a taste of Sapolsky’s late-night-dorm-room literary style.) [JAC: it’s not ALL like that, so her comment is inaccurate.]

I don’t care about Sapolsky’s style, or about what either Coyne or Riskin think of it. I care only to note that the stuff about “captains” can only be reasonably directed against those libertarians who may suppose that there is a homunculus in our heads that is somehow “managing” things even in contravention of determinism. The compatibilist simply does not suppose that, so any such critique of free will is wide of the mark against the compatibilist.

More later.

 

[Jarhyn]

Second, he overlooks Sapolsky’s demand that in order for us to have free will, we should demonstrate free will in an neuron, which is as confused as saying that to demonstrate that water is wet, we should demonstrate wetness in water molecules

This is something I find rather problematic insofar as I have asserted on multiple occasions that we DO see free will even in a single neuron, insofar as it reifies a structure of contingent action.

The problem is that will and freedom look very different on small scales.

It is not different, in fact exactly the same statement, were someone to ask how computation can be accomplished by switches because a single switch's action doesn't at first glance seem to be "computation", because people lack a generalized model of computation with which to identify the trivial case, in the same way that they lack a general model of "wetness": of it is to do with the molecule's ability to adhere to a surface while being mobile (to "wet" something), then yes even a single molecule can be "wet" given some environmental condition.

I can describe the will of the switch "the freedoms of the switch are to fire in states A, and not to fire in states B", as this describes what the switch *will* do, *whatever* the events of the environment.

A single switch. A single neuron. Yes, even these things have freedoms and wills.

They just look quite different, in the same way that a primitive trivial "NAND" looks quite different from a processor, despite the fact that the processor is logically just a construction of NAND units and units that share functional identity with NAND constructions.

 

[pood]

The following is Coyne quoting Riskin:

How does he know? Because of science. Sapolsky tells us that “the science of human behavior shows” it to be deterministic. But none of the scientific evidence he offers turns out to demonstrate this.

Riskin is correct.

He describes psychological studies revealing changes in people’s electroencephalograms (EEGs) taking place milliseconds before they were aware of making a decision, but he dismisses these—reasonably enough—as “irrelevant.”

Both Riskin and Sapolsky are correct, it’s irrelevant.

He presents other studies demonstrating that people can be subconsciously manipulated; that hormones, cultural beliefs, and moral values influence behavior; and that maturation, aging, and experience induce alterations in people’s brains and bodies with corresponding behavioral changes. After each discussion he asks, “Does this disprove free will?” and responds—again reasonably—with “nah,” “nope,” “certainly not,” and “obviously not.” Readers might wonder, equally reasonably, why they’ve slogged through all this irrelevant nonevidence.

Here, I think to Sapolksy’s credit, he is employing the philosophical concept of the “principle of charity” to try to build the strongest possible case for free will before knocking it down, so I think Riskin’s plaint here misses the mark.

Now back to Jerry Coyne:

]That might be a fair criticism of Sapolsky’s style, but I don’t remember him saying that this evidence is irrelevant (it’s been a while since I read the book). But I do think that predicting behaviors before one is conscious of performing them raises the priors of determinism, as do the many, many ways that you can trick people into thinking they have agency when they don’t (brain stimulation, effects of drugs, computer experiments) or thinking they are not doing something consciously when they are (Ouija boards). Sean Carroll’s essay “On Determinism” (with extensive quotes by Massimo Pigliucci) makes a good case that the universality of the laws of physics leaves no room for libertarian free will.

Once again, we must question the justification for “laws” being prescriptive, as opposed to descriptive. But, here is a the rub:

(Sean is a compatibilist and, although a determinist, says we have “free will” in a different sense. Dan Dennett used to say the same thing.)

That’s right! So, in this discussion by Coyne, I ask again: What happened to compatibilism?

More later.

 

[steve_bank]

in which a given initial state or condition

There, in your very own words. The initial condition is *given*. Which means that... Deterministic action happens after it is *given* and is entirely agnostic to *how* it is given.

And no, Steve, determinism is no more than "the universe functions deterministically".

It is always *given* a start condition.

The BB theory starts with an imagined set of initial conditions, but does not say how the initial co0jnditions came to be, it does no start at time zero.

You can not necessarily apply thermodynamics and deterministic systems as we see and create here on Earth to a cosmic scale. It can not be demonstrated on a cosmic scale.

The universe can be said to be causal, nothing happens without a cause. Chaotic and probabilistic systems are causal. A complex industrial chemical process involving stages can have a probability of working, but is causal.