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Note: I'm obviously talking about the metaphysical libertarianism, not the political ideology.
Be sure to explain why.
by 773491 on September 12th, 2011
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You're reading Which do you consider more convincing and why: determinism, compatibilism, libertarianism, other?
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Thank you for the link :)
As for the definitions, I suppose I'll just stick to google definition:
Determinism
The doctrine that all events, including human action, are ultimately determined by causes external to the will.
Compatibilism
Compatibilism is the belief that free will and determinism are compatible ideas, and that it is possible to believe both without being logically inconsistent.
I have no problem you presenting a working definition if you so choose.
First off, I think I should mention I'm neutral in terms of free will. This was just recently brought to my attention so I've decided to look a little more into it.
Dennett's main objections seem to be that determinism would promote immoral acts such as cheating because and this would take away any moral responsibility.
Tomorrow if I have time I'll address what Sam Harris wrote (which is who brought this issue to me) in The Moral Landscape. It's from pages 102-112 if you happen to have the book and want to read it.
But in the meantime here's a few videos on the subject by Harris.
Sam Harris Explains The Dilemmas Of Free Will
Free Will with Sam Harris
There are some arguments against determinism which are damning I think, such as determinism being unfalsifiable (as far as I know) as well as some instances in physics.
by Coexist on September 12th, 2011
I've got the book. Might check out the videos later. Actually, I think falsifiability is overrated. Popper missed that you can still probabilistically 'confirm' a theory with lots of positive results -- though obviously, each positive result counts much less as 'evidence' than a negative one would. It's the difference between 'traditional rationality' and Bayesian rationality.
You're probably talking about Heisenberg's uncertainty principle or random quantum fluctuations. I think the consensus is that somehow those things are still determined, even though it would be impossible to predict them within the system. It's just that time seems to exist as an extra dimension 'already present'. Though we must be careful to not get misled by the word 'dimension'...
by 773491 on September 13th, 2011
This videos are mostly for a reference so you can see Harris' position better if you need to.
But since you have the book then that might not be necessary.
I'll just give some examples that I think are good arguments made by Harris and see what your input is on it.
On page 103:
"All of our behavior can be traced to biological events about which we have no conscious knowledge: this has always suggested that free will is an illusion. For instance, the physiologist Benjamin Libet famously demonstrated that activity in the brain's motor regions can be detected some 350 milliseconds before a person feels that he has decided to move. Another lab recently used fMRI data to show that some 'conscious' decisions can be predicted up to 10 seconds
by Coexist on September 14th, 2011
before they enter awareness (long before the preparatory motor motor activity detected by Libet)."
The example on page 104:
"The problem is that no account of causality leaves room for free will. Thoughts, moods, and desires of every sort simply spring into view--and move us, or fail to move us, for reasons that are, from a subjective point of view, perfectly inscrutable. Why did I use the term 'inscrutable' in the previous sentence? I must confess that I do not know. Was I free to do otherwise? What could such a claim possibly mean? Why, after all, didn't the word 'opaque' come to mind? Well, it just didn't--and now that it vies for a place on the page, I find that I am still partial to my original choice. Am I free with respect to this preference? Am I free to feel 'opaque' is the better word, when I just do not feel that it is the better word?
by Coexist on September 14th, 2011
Am I free to change my mind? Of course not. It can only change me."
Page 106:
"Where our intentions themselves come from, however, and what determines their character in every instant, remains perfectly mysterious in subjective terms. Our sense of free will arises from a failure to appreciate this fact...."
In the proceeding pages he compared how development of the mind and how the MPFC effect how a person behaves.
I realized how much of a semantic this seems to be. I also realized that compatibilism is basically determinism with a different definition of free will. :/
Here are some arguments in favor of indeterminism.
I was thinking about the HUP and quantum fluctuations precisely.
In The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene (from pages 340-343) "We have seen that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle undercuts Laplacian determinism because we fundamentally cannot know the precise positions and velocities of the constituents of the universe. Instead, these classical properties are replaced by quantum wave functions, which tell us only the probability that any given particle is here or there, or that it has this or that velocity" (341).
Later he mentions quantum determinism, which you can read here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism#Other_matters_of_quantum_determinism This replaced Laplacian determinism, which is probably what you were talking about earlier.
Also, when talking about black holes, he say "When anything falls into a black hole, its wave function gets sucked in as well.... To predict the future fully we need to know all the wave functions fully today. But, if some have escaped down the abyss of black holes, the information they contain is lost.... Radiation carries energy and so, as a black hole radiates, its mass slowly decreases--it slowly evaporates. As it does so, the distance from the center of the hole to the event horizon slowly shrinks, and as this shroud recedes, regions of space that were previously cut off re-enter the cosmic arena" (342).
When this was written there wasn't any evidence to suggest that the information in black holes were destroyed or if, when it recedes, the information re-enters space. I don't know if anything has turned up?
Greene also quotes Hawking saying: "I believe that if one takes Einstein's general relativity seriously, one must allow the possibility that spacetime ties itself in knots and that information gets lost in the folds" (343).
I'm not familiar with the equations for relativity, so would you happen to know if his equations suggest this? Or maybe there's a qualitative understanding that I just didn't understand?
Lastly, there's a YouTuber (CobraJones: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgJQPjQQXs8&feature=channel_video_title ) that did a video on determinism and argued for an indeterministic view. If you want to watch it he goes through several definitions at the beginning, but starting at 4:15 he gives the example of Schrodinger's cat disproving determinism. But I think you can simply counter this with quantum determinism, as mentioned earlier.
This is probably going to be pretty long. Soooo, yeah. Sorry bout that :P
by Coexist on September 14th, 2011
"I also realized that compatibilism is basically determinism with a different definition of free will. :/"
Exactly! :)
Regarding quantum wave functions, I think indeterminism would only apply if there was 'one future'. But if the Many Worlds 'Interpretation' holds, then all the possible states will actually happen. And from what I've read, the Many Worlds 'Interpretation' is very likely to be true (and 'interpretation' would be the wrong word because it's more than that, it actually makes different predictions than the Copenhagen one). But I must stress that my understanding of this stuff is in no way technical, I just read a lot of books.
Regarding black holes, I read somewhere that they radiate from their surface, and that's where the information actually remains. I think it might even have been Brian Green who wrote about it, it's a relatively new discovery. The determinism question is interesting to think about, but ultimately, I don't think it really matters in any practical sense. It's not like indeterminism would actually make us any 'freer' in the sense worth wanting.
by 773491 on September 15th, 2011