Determinism

Freewill is macroscopic quantum coherence suspending the collapse of superpositions long enough for the brain to get it’s shit together and effect the outcome.

Not sure I entirely believe it, but it sure sounds cool.

At any rate, I’ll settle for ‘unpredictable will’, which kicks determinism out the window. Kinda.

Pick one:

• you couldn’t have said it better if you tried
• you couldn’t have said it worse if you tried

=D> [-o< :-" :-&

Sorry, that too was beyond my control.

Reclaiming Freedom
Steve Taylor says of determinism: “I refute it thus!”

Again, what am I missing here? As though somehow the “spiritual” facet of human interactions is exempt from the laws of matter. The Buddha teaches self-discipline and self-control. And, surely, the Buddha himself was exempt from the laws of nature.

And certainly God is.

It always comes back to the psychological sense – here manifested in religion – that [somehow] I just know that what I am thinking and feeling and saying and doing is under my control. Sure, contingent on both genetic and memetic variables that are, in some crucial respects, beyond my control, but… but never completely beyond my control.

And that may well be the case. I certainly have not reached the point where, at times, I don’t have significant doubts about my own recent turn in the direction of determinism. Viscerally, it just does not seem possible that I am not of my own volition [whatever that means] typing what I do here. But it’s that I can’t know this beyond all doubt that is always there exasperating me.

Right, like he can go to the scientists who study this empirically and experimentally, using the rigors of the “scientific method”, and say, “Okay, give me the definitive argument I can use to prove that a ‘spiritual’ quest does in fact demonstrate the reality of free will among our species.”

Really, who cares how long the introspective process is when there are folks on both sides of the debate who have gone down that path and come to different conclusions.

Disciplines like Buddhism are just more intent and intense in focusing in on the ego in ways that other religious denominations are not. But that doesn’t make either the intention or the intensity of the pursuit any less necessarily exempt from whatever brought matter into existence and then laid down the law regarding what it can or cannot do. Only to the extent that the human brain is shown to be the one exception to the rule, does autonomy become more plausible. Spiritually or otherwise.

Saving the Self
Raymond Tallis defends personal identity from those who say the self is an illusion.

Tell me this is not downright “spooky”? There you are poking around inside the brain or probing it in real time, functioning through fMRI images. And who knows what new technology the neuroscientists either have or will have at their disposal.

But it’s not like they have ever reached the point where, while performing their experiments, probing their images, they actually make contact with the “I”. The part of the brain able to be separated out from the purely biological functions of all the parts.

Imagine that conversation!

See? As soon as you start in on the actual interaction between brain scientists and any one particular brain, you’re back to the chemical and the neurological interactions that can be documented and encompassed as in fact true objectively.

At best we can note the biological parameters involved and then point out how this particular brain in this particular head in this particular person is intertwined with all of the other things that we are reasonably certain about regarding the historical, cultural, and interpersonal “I”.

Without coming into contact with that “stand alone bit of the brain”, we are back to square one.

Reclaiming Freedom
Steve Taylor says of determinism: “I refute it thus!”

Of course Nietzsche too was no less addicted to his own “general description intellectual contraptions” in exploring the nature of “I” able to “overcome” itself “in his head”.

But what “out in the world” does that mean when, in overcoming yourself in any particular context, others overcoming themselves, insist that the consequences of your own overcoming comes into conflict with the consequences of their overcoming.

Exactly: As soon as this or that overcoming precipitates social and political and economic conflicts, what then?

Suppose you set out to “overcome” yourself in regard to the coronavirus? How do you suppose that might play itself out given particular behaviors that you choose?

As for being “self-satisfied”, how is this not in turn the embodiment of dasein? You may choose a new path and for all practical purposes your choices may improve your lot in the world. But what I always focus on is the part where the consequences of this “new you” detracts from the well-being of others.

The part that for me precipitates the fracturing and the fragmenting. How does it not for you? And, again, how is any of this back and forth assessing able to be demonstrated as within the parameters of human autonomy?

Here’s how the author “demonstrates” it?

He merely asserts all of the above to be true by assuming he was not compelled by the laws of nature embodied in his brain to do so. And it’s not like the determinists can demonstrate otherwise. So, around and around we all go, leap by leap by leap.

The Free Will of Ebenezer Scrooge
Richard Kamber considers the possibility of changing destiny.

Wow. I recall as a child, there were two movies that first got me to thinking about the relationship between time, myself and free will. One was The Time Machine with Rod Taylor and the other was A Christmas Carol with Alastair Sim.

And it was the part that took us into the future that most intrigued me. After all if we could go into the future and observe it, how could it ever not but be that way?

But then there is also the focus of films like Back To the Future, Timecrimes and Primer…films that explore how, if we go back in time and change something, that changes the future into something else. But what I could never quite configure in my head was the part about the future. If, for example, today, we could go forward in time 6 months and see our coronavirus ravaged world then, how could things not be compelled to unfold such that this was the only possible future?

Then the part where, in the multiverse, every possible combination of events exists in one or another of an infinite number of parallel universes.

Even now I still can’t quite wrap my head around the extent to which I am thinking this through in the most rational manner. Or if there is a way in which to think it through in the most rational manner at all.

Who can really “assure us” of anything here?

The Free Will of Ebenezer Scrooge
Richard Kamber considers the possibility of changing destiny.

Again, however, this presumes there must be at least some measure of human autonomy here. Otherwise in a wholly determined universe as I understand it both protagonists act out only that which their creators [Dickens and Sophocles ] were compelled by nature to invent for them.

That’s how surreal this all becomes. The characters in both Oedipus Rex and A Christmas Carol, acquire “free will” from the authors who created them. But could not nature be construed as the “author” of both Dickens and Sophocles themselves? It’s just that with nature, the most surreal aspect of all is that there does not appear to be any teleological intention behind anything at all. Matter is just somehow able reconfigure itself into a mindful consciousness that is still no less driven to interact with all other matter [mindful or not] in the only possible way that can be.

In other words, how is being a philosopher examining this change anything? Aren’t they all in turn no less subsumed in these laws?

See my points above. The wisdom that Dickens imparts to Scrooge either is or is not interchangeable with nature creating a brain able to accomplish this. To make a distinction between “may be” and “will be” seems part and parcel of the position described by the compatibilists. A point of view I am still not able to grapple with and grasp. If it is nature and only nature that is behind things “departed from”, then nature and Dickens and Scrooge and all of us are intertwined in the one and only one possible reality.

But over and again I acknowledge the problem here may well be my own inability to think this through correctly…assuming it is within my capacity even to think it through correctly.

The Free Will of Ebenezer Scrooge
Richard Kamber considers the possibility of changing destiny.

Of course here we immediately bump into the gap/chasm between deducing that this is true in an argument and, say, devising an experiment that would demonstrate that this is empathically true empirically, existentially. Only here the experiment itself may or may not be wholly compelled by nature.

Same with the current coronavirus pandemic. Few would argue that the virus itself is choosing to wreak havoc on the lives of millions and millions of us. And our bodies react to it [down to the most miniscule of quantum particles] like atomic clockwork. Until we come to the brain. Are the laws of nature also wholly applicable to it as well? And how far are we from closing the gap between posts like these and definitive experiments able to provide the definitive proof that my “I” and your “I” does or does not possess at least some capacity to the react to the virus of our own free will.

Still, however more protracted our speculations become, nothing really changes. These conjectures either are entirely subsumed in consequences that are entirely subsumed in the laws of matter, or someone comes up with the verifiable evidence, documented scientifically, that “I” really is somehow the one exception to the rule.

And dreams provide us only with experiences regarding just how profoundly problematic reality can be…or can appear to be. “I” while in them seems as authentic as “I” wholly awake and aware. These “chains of events” in dreams are experienced by us as though “I” is more than just “another link in the causal chain”. But how is this then conclusively, decisively confirmed?

The Free Will of Ebenezer Scrooge
Richard Kamber considers the possibility of changing destiny.

One thing here I know for sure: if this intelligence does in fact exist on this planet, the argument hasn’t gotten around to me yet.

How about you? What, in your view, reflects the argument that at least comes closest? Acknowledging of course that we are not privy to the arguments of intelligent life forms on any other planet. Or to an explanation from God, if in fact there is one. Or [of course] even if any explanation that we are privy to at all is not embodied in a wholly determined universe.

The author “considers the possibility of changing destiny” here, but that must involve a definition of destiny that I am not familiar with. If you can change our destiny in regard to “know[ing] and analyz[ing] all the conditions and forces of nature at a certain moment” in order to encompass the past, present and future wholly in sync with the laws of nature, then it clearly wasn’t destiny in the first place.

How can something that could only ever be, ever be “tragic”? Instead, the laws of matter – nature – may well have created a human mind able to concoct a psychological state that we were compelled to construe as tragic.

Think about the creations of Nathan in the film Ex Machina – viewtopic.php?f=24&t=179469&p=2562128&hilit=ex+machina+directed#p2562128

Then the scene where it dawns on Caleb that he too might be just another creation of Nathan. And, if that had turned out to be the case, and he felt that this was tragic…?

You tell me.

The Free Will of Ebenezer Scrooge
Richard Kamber considers the possibility of changing destiny.

my emphasis

Compelled or not, this argument still makes the most sense to me. I was never not able to type these words. You were never not able to read them. And the consequences of that could not be clearer: personal responsibility is a psychological illusion built by nature into the human brain for whatever reason that the immutable laws of nature exist at all.

Morality is no less an illusion. Therefore any good things that I take credit for or any bad things for which I am blamed, were always ever going to be going back to what was always ever going to be given all of the necessary components of existence itself. And, therefore, “compatibilism” is in turn no less subsumed in a necessary reality itself.

Not that I can actually demonstrate that any of this is indisputably true.

Here, as with you, I am stuck with that which up until now I was compelled by nature – compelled by what? – to think myself into believing.

Unless of course someone has accomplished the task of his or her own volition of demonstrating that in fact it is otherwise.

Anyone here perchance?

Gasp!

See how it works? The extent to which determinism is one thing rather than another becomes entirely dependent on how one defines it. Then, what, it is merely assumed as well that how you define it is also encompassed in that definition? Again, going back to what in fact really is the case embedded in the gap between what “I” think explains reality [human and otherwise] and all that would need to be known to explain it.

Encompassing in turn this…

Okay, this is what some believe about quantum interactions. But who among us is able to demonstrate definitively that this is in fact the case?

Thought I’d put this one here too…

Nietzsche and Morality
Roger Caldwell responds to an analysis of Nietzsche’s morality.

Here we go again. A determinist who argues that human beings are part of “a causul web that comprises the whole universe” and then reconfigures that into a will that is either strong or weak.

Morality aside, if one’s will is entirely shaped by the laws of matter compelling the brain to embody either a weak or a strong will in any particular individual what difference does that make when manifested in human interactions if those interactions could only be what nature compels?

What the hell do I keep missing here…if I actually do have the capacity to not miss it?

Same thing. Making a distinction between grasping the surface of things and grasping things in depth in a world where both are a necessary/inherent component of nature’s immutable laws is for all practical purposes to make no distinction at all. Or so it still seems to me.

Same thing. In a wholly determined universe how could anything that we think, feel, say and do not be rational if by rational we mean wholly in sync with the laws of matter?

This is something I come back to time and again because the only way morality can have any real substantive meaning in our lives is if in some way that we may or may not come to understand we are in fact free to choose behaviors other than the ones that we do.

Right?

The Free Will of Ebenezer Scrooge
Richard Kamber considers the possibility of changing destiny.

This is particularly difficult for me to wrap my head around. If, in my brain, “random” chemical and neurological interactions occurred spontaneously what exactly would bring this about? Would it just happen “out of the blue”? Somehow connected or not connected at all to those processes that are in sync with the laws of matter.

I mean, how disturbing would that be? I think, feel, say and do things for reasons that can both be explained and not explained? If we have no control over these random “firings” in our brain, then we would have to figure out a way to connect the dots between them and, say, moral responsibility.

In other words, which might be worse, doing things only because we could not not do them, or doing things because our brain just stochastically sets what we do into motion

And, in fact, when you look at the interaction of matter, it’s not for nothing that you don’t often encounter things happening that would seem to suggest this sort of randomness. It’s just that with self-conscious mindful matter, we encounter behaviors strange enough to suspect it. Here though people might be doing something that seems absolutely unintelligible to us…but that is only because we don’t understand the context or are not privy to their motive. Or maybe the laws of matter manifest themselves in any number of diseases that can afflict the brain.

It’s just that even those behaviors that seem to reflect “choices and actions…determined in accordance with our beliefs and desires”, may not actually be determined that way at all. Also, there are brain afflictions like Stereotypic Movement Disorder that can in fact cause someone to bang their head against the wall. Repeatedly.

The Free Will of Ebenezer Scrooge
Richard Kamber considers the possibility of changing destiny.

And here we go again: compatibilism

Once more I will make the attempt to grasp how this is actually possible given my own assumption that the human brain is in fact [if it is a fact] just the latest in the evolution of matter wholly in sync with its own physical laws.

Any exceptions would have to be explained in such a way that the attempt to explain in and of itself is not [somehow] in sync with these laws.

Right, like what the compatibilists believe is an exception to the material laws of nature.

Uh, exactly?

From my frame of mind [compelled or not] there appears to be no argument that the compatibilists can propose that makes this go away. Only the psychological illusion that their argument regarding “guidance of our actions” and “correction of our selves” produces this “voluntary involuntary” compatibility.

That’s what still makes sense to me too. Otherwise you are attributing to “I” – re the past, present and future – some “extra” quality that accounts for both the laws of matter and volition. Which many link to one or another God.

And it may be there. But, if so, link me to the scientific and/or philosophical and/or spiritual argument that explains it. Along with an actual demonstration of why all rational men and women are obligated to accept it. In part voluntarily and in part involuntarily.

The Free Will of Ebenezer Scrooge
Richard Kamber considers the possibility of changing destiny.

I think on the most visceral level this encompasses much of the skepticism that many have in regard to hard determinism.

Consider…

Up to a point the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon Rainforest can result in a tornado in Oklahoma seems vaguely reasonable. For one thing neither the butterfly nor the tornado are conscious of the actual physical laws of nature that would make something like this possible. But in fact these laws do exist and the butterfly and the tornado are just along for the ride.

This is often referred to as “choas theory”…but in fact it is really anything but. In fact, quite the opposite. Nothing is random here. It is all wholly in sync with the only possible reality there could be.

But then consider further this chain of events: Something brings into existence the universe, nature, reality…existence itself. And its immutable laws. And, as a result of that, I have no choice but to shoot my next door neighbor dead.

And yet given determinism as some claim it to be, both events would seem to be interchangable. In other words, they [and, for that matter, everything else] happen solely because there is no way in which they could not have happened.

Yep, that’s certainly one way to look at it. On the other hand, that’s not the only way to define determinism. Thus…

Actually, what I want to know is this: Is there a way in which to determine if what I want to know is in fact something that I could freely have chosen not to want to know instead?

Our brains allow us to ponder that but our brains are also embedded smack dab in the middle of what we are attempting to understand. How can we possibly get around that?

The Free Will of Ebenezer Scrooge
Richard Kamber considers the possibility of changing destiny.

Whatever the computer predicts that you will do and whatever you “choose” to do instead – either in sync with or contrary to what the computer predicts – who cares? It all either unfolds only as it ever could have or you actually are able to choose of your own volition to defy the computer’s prediction. And, as well, we are either able to conclude which of our own volition or we are not.

That’s why “thought experiments” of this sort seem moot if they are in turn ever and always included in a brain thinking them up that is ever and always subsumed in the laws of matter unfolding immutably.

Then more words that are ensnared in all that we do not know about these relationships:

All of this conjecture is basically over my head. What exactly is he suggesting here about determinism as it relates to the computer, to the computer programmer, and to you or I either raising or not raising our hand.

Freely.

Either there is an argument – a demonstrable argument – able to establish human volition here or there is not. Otherwise [to me] it’s just more words defining and defending more words still without the capacity to reconfigure the thought experiment itself something altogether new and different. Something that truly astonishes us about this age-old debate: Wow! I never thought of that!

The Free Will of Ebenezer Scrooge
Richard Kamber considers the possibility of changing destiny.

On the other hand, an advocate of the consequence argument may be entirely compelled by the laws of nature to pounce on his words.

Then around and around everyone goes. Embedded – inherently? – smack dab in the middle of that ubiquitous gap between what we think we know about all of this and the fact that “we don’t have a broad or clear enough view of the chains of causes that bring that future about.”

Can’t have?

But what recourse is there but to presume “I” does have at least some capacity not to be necessarily entangled in all the variables there are when nature subsumes nurture in a particular set of circumstances and we ponder why we choose this instead of that.

Here we know that Scrooge lives in a wholly determined world because he is just a character invented by Dickens. Nothing he thinks, feels, says or does is not entirely dependent on the choices that Dickens makes. Instead, it’s Dickens writing the novel and you and I reading it that prompts the sort of reactions we encounter on threads like this one.

Okay, fine, that reply sounds better than it is. As though anyone else has come up with a reply so superior that all others must be measured against it. It’s not in acknowledging the limited scope our ability here, but in acknowledging the extent to which we really have no definitive idea of what an unlimited scope might possibly be.

But then I reprimand myself here by pointing out that all the author is attempting is a conjecture that clearly seems to be more educated, more sophisticated than others.

In other words, I recognize that what angers me the most is in having to accept that I will almost certainly go to the grave as ultimately ignorant then as when I first became fascinated with the question itself.

The Free Will of Ebenezer Scrooge
Richard Kamber considers the possibility of changing destiny.

Again, to particular physicists, it may be perfectly rational to argue that, at any one moment in time, matter throughout the universe is not wholly sync given the parameters of what is thought to be the laws of matter.

But how on earth would they actually go about demonstrating that. You may age a tiny bit less when you get off the plane than those waiting for you at the airport but how is it then demonstrated that this in and of itself is not only as it could ever have been given a determined universe?

And, with self-conscious matter, embodied in any particular mind in any particular context, perceptions of time can be radically different. If you are in agony, each minute can seem like an hour. If you are awash in pleasure the hour may seem to just fly by. But the hour itself still encompasses 60 minutes. An entirely human construct that our species was free to concoct or was not.

So what? Either the local universe or that part of the universe millions of light years away are in tandem with the laws of matter or the laws of matter are discovered – autonomously – to be different depending on where you happen to be here and now in the universe. Very little of what happens in some remote village in the Amazon rainforest effects what happens to people in Baltimore. But the same laws of nature would seem to be applicable to all of us.

Instead, what changes are the “rules of behavior”. How does that factor into “the human condition”?

Same thing. Either all of our brains are in tandem with the only way that brains can function given the only way that brain matter can interact, or there is some component of “I” – God? the soul? will? – that makes human consciousness unlike any other matter that we now know of.

Or, rather, that I know of.

The Free Will of Ebenezer Scrooge
Richard Kamber considers the possibility of changing destiny.

And isn’t this the number one reason why most of us will scoff at the very idea that is actually possible? Going back to this:

“A few minutes into the expansion, when the temperature was about a billion kelvin and the density of matter in the universe was comparable to the current density of Earth’s atmosphere, neutrons combined with protons to form the universe’s deuterium and helium nuclei in a process called Big Bang nucleosynthesis.”

That here I am typing these words and here you are reading them derived wholly from this?!

There is no way I am even remotely able to wrap my own “I” around it. There’s just got to be more. From a God, the God to one or another account of pantheism. Buddhism perhaps? Mindless matter evolving into mindful matter evolving into self conscious mindful matter is the whole ball of wax. Either we come to understand this or we just go to the grave like all those billions before us taking our own, by comparison, puny leap to that which works for us in our head.

Or, rather, my own puny leap. I don’t have the capacity to “think” myself into the sort of intellectual leap that there folks are: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=195793

Can hard determinism account for a thread such as this too?

Yep, that’s what it asks us to believe alright. On the other hand, my point is always to focus instead on what appears to me to be that enormous gap between what any of us think we know about all this and all that would need to be known about existence itself to make that anything less than a stab – a stumble – in the dark.

In a strange way, however, one can take comfort in that. I’m just not entirely sure why.

Ambiguous said,

“It asks us to believe that if time could be rolled back even to one second after the Big Bang, then history would unfold in exactly the same way, and all these events would occur again without the slightest variation. There can be no wiggle room in the iron block universe as it rolls forward. This is a lot to ask us to believe, and is far too speculative to be taken on faith. As far as we now know, it is just as likely that the past and present could have turned out differently than they did, and that the future that lies before” us is alterable in important respects.

That’s just t point of regress, at that cosmic scale the most convincing argument is that the difference has become totally imperceptible , even by god.

Another big bang would have to occur for that god to realize the ability to refresh an absolutely enlightened creation, where Adam and Eve could not care one way or another.

That is, if multiple big bangs are conceivable.

The more likely scenario is an ever fed back. moebius curvature

That type of representation may help to reinforce a more faithful. speculation.

“People have inferred that time began then, but there really wasn’t any reason for that inference,” said Neil Turok, a theoretical physicist at the University of Cambridge, “What we are proposing is very radical. It’s saying there was time before the big bang.”

Under his theory, published today in the journal Science with Paul Steinhardt at Princeton University in New Jersey, the universe must be at least a trillion years old with many big bangs happening before our own. With each bang, the theory predicts that matter keeps on expanding and dissipating into infinite space before another horrendous blast of radiation and matter replenishes it. “I think it is much more likely to be far older than a trillion years though,” said Prof Turok. “There doesn’t have to be a beginning of time. According to our theory, the universe may be infinitely old and infinitely large.”

Or:

"The möbius strip with one twist and pinched in the middle looks like the symbol for infinity. Some believe that our universe is actualized as a möbius strip with a finite number of twists of the vibrating strings in space. It is finite in that by going forward it transverses time and space, turning in a warped circle as it experiences its own starting point. It recurs over and over again, perhaps eternally.

The universe came from nothing; the nothing that formed the being and existence of the universe is the Infinite. That this has to be so is inescapable. People have long argued about first causes, but nothingness had to come into existence. There is no other logical answer. Infinity is needed to have the Finite. A solitary, non-dual Infinity precedes the yin and yang of existence itself.

The nothing that is beyond the boundary of our universe is Infinity. It both exits and does not exist simultaneously. It has never been actualized because it has no dimension. Nothingness has everything to do with being and existence because everything is made manifest through nothingness. Nothingness is not temporal. It is non-dimensional. The closest we can get to it is to know that it is not a thing at all, but ‘NoThing’.

Nothing actually does exist and it has always been that way.

The duality of being disappears in the infinity of nothingness. When we realize that nothing really exists, this is not the height of nihilistic thought, but a universal condition that implores understanding. The sentence itself implies that nothing does exist, but that nothing is neither material nor spacial nor a part of time. This discovery does not negate the chemical composition of matter in our actual world, but helps to further refine its essence. That nothing exists does not mean that the world is an illusion or organic chemistry cannot help us lead better lives. It means that the world developed from nothing and exists despite its ghostly origin. No matter how you try to rationalize it away, the world had to come from nothing at all because that is the supreme and only reality. Within time, space is filled with virtual energy, not nothingness. We can even tap this source for power and we will probably draw most of our power usage from that source in the future."

Now which one?

The Free Will of Ebenezer Scrooge
Richard Kamber considers the possibility of changing destiny.

Why does this seem to make sense to so many others?

Consider:

If the words that I am now typing reflect something that I made happen because all of what I make happen is wholly in sync with the laws of matter, how is not why I chose to make it happen not in turn merely another manifestation of determinism? What on earth does it mean to speak of values as the embodiment of aspirations precipitating the act of typing these words “intentionally and deliberately” really encompass if I was never able to not type them?

Again, to me this is basically just an intellectual contraption…unless and until neuroscientists and those who study the human brain can demonstrate that part whereby in choosing to type these words a chemical and neurological sequence unfolds in my brain such that they are able to note how I might have chosen not to type these words at all; or was freely able to type different words instead.

May be? Will be? May not be? Will not be? Is this something that has finally been pinned down once and for all? Okay, link me to the best argument backed up by the best evidence. While providing me with your own argument backed up by ample evidence able to demonstrate that somehow the act of doing so in a determined universe is separate and distinct from why you chose to act as you did and did not choose another behavior instead.

Perhaps? Yeah, that works for me.