There is an argument that free will doesnât exist because there is an unbroken chain of causality we are riding on that dates back to the beginning of time. Meaning that every time you fart, scratch your nose, blink, or make lifechanging decisions there is a pre existing reason. These reasons might be anything from the sensory enviornment you were in the past minute, the hormone levels in your bloodstream at the time, hormones you were exposed to as a baby, or how you were parented growing up. No thought you have is really original and is more like a domino affect of neurons firing off in reaction to what you have experienced. What are your thoughts on this?
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I think the question is ill defined. The answer is entirely dependent on the definitions you use and i donât think answering the question really leads to a meaningfully different view of the world or has any real intellectual consequences.
Nope, I donât.
Doesnât really matter, though. We certainly have the illusion of free will, we behave as if it exists, so it doesnât actually matter in a practical sense.
It is fun to think about!
I have no choice but to believe in it.
You could become convinced your perception of it is an illusion and not reality as it actually is, then you would have no choice not to believe it.
In my opinion humans are biological machines reacting to stimulus based on previous experience.
If we could theoretically perfectly map the brain and understand it, we could predict what a person would do.
At least that is how I have come to understand my existence.
Doesnât mean I am off the hook for my poor decisions either. I still have to make the decision, even if theoretically we already knew what I would do.
Yeah, this is pretty much exactly how I feel about it. The universe is nothing but dead matter being pushed around by blind force, and any sense of agency is just an emergent phenomenon that exists as an illusion in the brain without having any actual bearing on reality. If you perfectly understood all of the forces and matter involved, you could perfectly predict what any given human (or anything system at all) would do.
That said, I also believe that itâs a completely useless idea when youâre trying to navigate through life, so I mostly just keep it in the back of my head like some half-forgotten piece of trivia and spend most of my time pretending to be in control like everyone else. Cheers!
Me too. The illusion of choice is what makes life interesting I suppose.
This is my favorite take on this topic. I also feel this way and its hard to get people to look at it this way Iâve noticed. People tend to loop back to âIf theres no free will why do anything?â Or âIf there is no free will why should murderers be punished?â Just because theres possibly no free will doesnt mean we should change the way we live our lives.
Itâs a good question, though people tend to treat it as a thought-terminating clichĂŠ rather than exploring the implications. Why should murderers be punished, actually? Enacting punishment is an external incentive, a stimulus, supposedly structured to make the cost to the potential murderer higher than the benefit they hope to get by killing. Belief in punishment, therefore, is consistent with the non-free will position. But if thereâs no free will, then why not instead try to âsolveâ murder, and not have murderers anymore, by discovering the root causes that drive people to murder, and mitigating them? Weâd all be better off!
On the other hand, free will implies that the mechanism of punishment may or may not be punishing to the murderer. We donât know what they feel in response to stimulus; they have free will! Like in the story of Brâer Rabbit, trying to determine a foolproof method of punishment thatâs hateful to the murderer is an exercise in futility, since we canât know their mind.
Doesnât matter either way.
I agree. But then I am a pragmatist, which tends to make people extremely mad
Is there a tl;dr for that?
Sure:
â C. S. Peirce
I donât see why that would make anyone angry, but I also canât understand what the hell it actually means. âThe third grade of clearness of apprehensionâ? âMight conceivablyâ?
Well, understandable. Itâs one line out of a book, out of context. What he means is that no metaphysical nonsense actually matters, if it doesnât have real-world consequences. I.e. someone can claim Russellâs Teapot actually exists, and rest of us can just ignore them because itâs untestable and inconsequential.
This has made very many philosophers very angry, but I donât expect anyone whoâs not interested in philosophy to care.
Ah I gotcha. Thatâs an actual tl;dr. Makes sense to me and I agree.
Thereâs no evidence for free will. Every physical process involved in the function of our bodies and brains has so far proven to be deterministic in every way we can verify. That doesnât mean you canât have an original thought though, it just means that any original thought you have was necessarily going to happen and couldnât possibly have happened any other way. Itâs fate.
I donât think free will can be dismissed just because the framework that it runs on is deterministic.
Letâs say you program a text editor. A computer runs the program, but the computer has no influence on what text the user is going to write.
I think that consciousness is a user like that. It runs on deterministic hardware but itâs not necessarily deterministic due to that. It might be for other reasons, but the laws of physics isnât it, because physics doesnât prohibit free will from existing.
Consciousness is wildly complex. Itâs a self illusion and we really have no good idea about where decisions even come from.
If it is deterministic, it would have to involve every single atom in the universe that in one way or another have influenced the person. Wings of a butterfly and light from distant stars etc. Attempting to predict it would require a simulation of everything. That leads to other questions. If a simulation is a 1:1 replica of the real thing, which one is then real and what happens if we run it backwards, can we see what caused the big bang, etc.
So, even if this is about free will, the enquiry falls short on trying to figure out what even causes anything to happen at all.
If we are happy with accepting that the universe was caused by something before or outside the universe, then itâs really easy to point in that direction and say that free will also comes from there - somewhere outside the deterministic physics.
Of course the actual universe and the laws of physics are really not separate as data and functions. The data itself contains the instructions. Any system that can contain itself that way is incomplete as proved by Kurt GĂśdelâs incompleteness theorem. Truths do exist that canât be proven so perhaps the concept of free will is an example of such a thing, or maybe itâs not. The point is that we canât rule it out, just because it exists in a deterministic system.
Personally I donât think it matters all that much. Similarly to how we can only ever experience things that exists inside of the universe,or see the light that hits our eye, we can also only ever hope to experience free will on the level of our own consciousness, even if we acknowledge that it is influenced by all kinds of other things from all levels from atoms to the big bang.
The question is meaningless, the answer doesnât affect reality, unless you propose an external mind that is controlling or at least influencing our decisions.
Even with the external mind itâd be irrelevant. As long as we have no way of knowing the future or being able to predict it, having or not having free will is observed in exactly the same way.
If there were some external mind, one might at least speculate about its reasons. Which would probably be futile since it would influence those considerations too. Hm. Yeah.
No, we donât have free will. HOWEVER, I donât think that arguement will hold up in court.
It canât hold up in court. It ultimately does not matter whether someone is compelled to do evil, or chooses to do evil. Society must be protected in either case
I agree that there is no free will, but to act as if that is true is pointless. Nihilism isnât useful. If it makes you feel better, you are doing what you would have done regardless even if there was free will. I donât think the fact every action is predetermined matters much. If anything, it makes me have compassion for the worst people, who arguably were fated to be what they are because of the domino effect.
I often wonder if the dominos will ever fall in a way that guarantees us all a positive outcome. Can we heal our monsters? So that every domino thereafter creates no more?
ÂŻ_(ă)_/ÂŻ
Poetically, you are the universe trying to understand itself.
Even if the universe is nondeterministic like quantum physics suggests you still donât have free will because your thoughts and feelings are still ruled by physical processes even when they are random.
But you donât need physics to dispute free will. Schopenhauer already said that you may do what you want. But you cannot will what you want. Einstein used that realisation to not take everything too seriously even when people act infuriating.
citation needed
You exist in the brain, which is ruled by physical processes. Not sure what citations you need for that.
/me gestures in the general direction of the model of particle physics (and neuroscience)
For real though, they have even identified the hormone responsible for the âthis was my ideaâ feeling. But Iâm too lazy to google it.
Itâs not even wrong.
Just based on my observations of my life, I seem to have the ability to choose to do or not do things, and thatâs good enough for me. Is my choice just part of the infinite universeâs fixed progression through time and I would have done what I did regardless? Are there infinite parallel universes where parallel versions of me exist that have collectively made every choice I can possibly make? Donât care. I feel like I have free will and thatâs whatâs most relevant to my life for this version of me in this universe.
Free will is real and itâs an illusion at the same time.
Our actions are reactions. And we are very limited in our execution of will by the most basic physical boundaries. For example I cannot fly, no matter how much I will it to be so.
We have free will to control the actions of the biological apparatus which is our body, to an extent, though even those are limited by circumstances and consequences.
Overall we have limited free will, or free will âliteâ
In a deterministic reality, where all things are due and subject to causation, there can be no free will. If we did not live in a causal reality, weâd never be able to make accurate predictions or models.
âRandomnessâ is not free will either. If youâre not in complete control of your influences, then you can not be said to have free will. Randomness does nothing to help the argument for free will.
With that said. Regardless of the existence of free will, what does exists is your awareness of what itâs like to be you. To be in the circumstances that currently govern your life. And in that awareness exists the boundless capacity for compassion. Once you understand that no one is in control of their lives, that all things are causal, it allows you to be less judgmental.
"If a man is crossing a river and an empty boat collides with his own skiff, he will not become angry. He will simply guide his boat around it.
But if he sees a person in the boat, he will shout at the other to steer clear. If the shout is not heard, and the boats collide, he will curse the other person.
Yet, if the boat were empty, he would not be angry."
â Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi)
I wrote a simple explanation of determinism in a blog post earlier this year (thereâs an audio version available as well.) https://mrfunkedude.wordpress.com/2024/12/03/following-the-strings/
Just pointing this out - we donât live in a deterministic reality. Quantum interactions are inherently probabilistic and canât be predetermined. This usually doesnât matter, but you can chain larger classical systems onto quantum interactions (i.e. SchrĂśdingers cat), which makes them non-deterministic as well.
Thanks for the reply.
âinherently probabilistic and canât be determinedâ is just another way of saying ârandomâ or âwe donât know yetâ.
If reality was not deterministic, the reliability of models and predictions in physics would be upended.
Well yes, it means ârandomâ. Of course thereâs always a chance that weâre just missing something fundamental, but it would mean that literally every model we have is completely wrong. Unless we find indications for that (and there donât seem to be any so far) I think itâs fair to assume that quantum interactions are actually random.
No, because reality is not deterministic, yet the reliability of models and predictions in physics is not upended. There simply are enough of these interactions happening that, in the âmacroâ world, we can talk about them deterministically, since they are probabilistic. But that doesnât mean the âmicroâ interactions are deterministic, and it also doesnât mean itâs impossible for a âmacroâ interaction to be non-deterministic - again, the example of SchrĂśdingers cat comes to mind.
You could literally build a non-deterministic experiment right now if you wanted to.
In a sense it is deterministic. Itâs just when most people think of determinism, they think of conditioning on the initial state, and that this provides sufficient constraints to predict all future states. In quantum mechanics, conditioning on the initial state does not provide sufficient constraints to predict all future states and leads to ambiguities. However, if you condition on both the initial state and the final state, you appear to get determinstic values for all of the observables. It seems to be deterministic, just not forwards-in-time deterministic, but âall-at-onceâ deterministic. Laplaceâs demon would just need to know the very initial conditions of the universe and the very final conditions.
Hm, Iâm not sure if I understand the abstract correctly.
Say I build two SchrĂśdingers cat experiments next to each other, and connect them so that each vial dispersing the poison also makes the other vial disperse poison. I go away, and come back to both vials having triggered and both nuclear decays having occurred. How could I determine the path the whole system took?
I am not that good with abstract language. It helps to put it into more logical terms.
It sounds like what you are saying is that you begin with something a superposition of states like (1/â2)(|0⊠+ |1âŠ) which we could achieve with the H operator applied to |0⊠and then you make that be the cause of something else which we would achieve with the CX operator and would give us (1/â2)(|00⊠+ |11âŠ) and then measure it. We can call these t=0 starting in the |00⊠state, then t=1 we apply H operator to the least significant, and then t=2 is the CX operator with the control on the least significant.
I canât answer it for the two cats literally because they are made up it a gorillion particles and computing it for all of them would be computationally impossible. But in this simple case you would just compute the weak values which requires you to also condition on the final state which in this case the final states could be |00⊠or |11âŠ. For each observable, letâs say weâre interested in the one at t=x, you construct your final state vector by starting on this final state, specifically its Hermitian transpose, and multiplying it by the reversed unitary evolution from t=2 to t=x and multiply that by the observable then multiply that by the forwards-in-time evolution from t=0 to t=x multiplied by the initial state, and then normalize the whole thing by dividing it by the Hermitian transpose of the final state times the whole reverse time evolution from t=2 to t=0 and then by the final state.
In the case where the measured state at t=3 is |00⊠we get for the observables (most significant followed by least significant)âŚ
In the case where the measured state at t=3 is |11⊠we get for the observablesâŚ
The values |0⊠and |1⊠just mean that the Z observable has a value of +1 or -1, so if we just look at the values of the Z observables we can rewrite this in something a bit more readable.
Even though the initial conditions both began at |00⊠they have different values on their other observables which then plays a role in subsequent interactions. The least significant qubit in the case where the final state is |00⊠begins with a different signage on its Y observable than in the case when the outcome is |11âŠ. That causes the H opreator to have a different impact, in one case it flips the least significant qubit and in another case it does not. If it gets flipped then, since it is the control for the CX operator, it will flip the most significant qubit as well, but if itâs not then it wonât flip it.
Notice how there is also no t=3, because t=3 is when we measure, and the algorithm guarantees that the values are always in the state you will measure before you measure them. So your measurement does reveal what is really there.
If we say |0⊠= no sleepy gas is released and the cat is awake, and |1⊠= sleepy gas is released and the cat go sleepy time, then in the case where both cats are observed to be awake when you opened the box, at t=1: |00⊠meaning the first oneâs sleepy gas didnât get released, and so at t=2: |00⊠it doesnât cause the other oneâs to get released. In the case where both cats are observed to be asleep when you open the box, then t=1: |01⊠meaning the first oneâs did get released, and at t=2: |11⊠that causes the secondâs to be released.
When you compute this algorithm you find that the values of the observables are always set locally. Whenever two particles interact such that they become entangled, then they will form correlations for their observables in that moment and not later when you measure them, and you can even figure out what those values specifically are.
To borrow an analogy I heard from the physicist Emily Adlam, causality in quantum mechanics is akin to filling out a Sudoku puzzle. The global rules and some âknownâ values constrains the puzzle so that you are only capable of filling in very specific values, and so the âknownâ values plus the rules determine the rest of the values. If you are given the initial and final conditions as your âknownâ values plus the laws of quantum mechanics as the global rules constraining the system, then there is only one way you can fill in these numbers, those being the values for the observables.
Sorry, itâs been a long time since I last looked at the mathematical side of quantum mechanics, so most of your comment flew over my head. Let me put it in as simple terms as I can:
If there are multiple paths a system can take to reach a final state, how can you accurately determine which path was taken if you only know the initial & final state? IMO this shouldnât be possible.
Letâs say the initial state is at time t=x, the final state is at time t=z, and the state weâre interested in is at time t=y where x < y < z.
In classical mechanics you condition on the initial known state at t=x and evolve it up to the state youâre interested in at t=y. This works because the initial state is a sufficient constraint in order to guarantee only one possible outcome in classical mechanics, and so you donât need to know the final state ahead of time at t=z.
This does not work in quantum mechanics because evolving time in a single direction gives you ambiguities due to the uncertainty principle. In quantum mechanics you have to condition on the known initial state at t=x and the known final state at t=z, and then evolve the initial state forwards in time from t=x to t=y and the final state backwards in time from t=z to t=y where they meet.
Both directions together provide sufficient constraints to give you a value for the observable.
I canât explain it in more detail than that without giving you the mathematics. What you are asking is ultimately a mathematical question and so it demands a mathematical answer.
But thatâs ignoring that there are multiple paths that can lead to state
z, isnât it?Iâll try to design the simplest possible experiment: you have to radioactive atoms, each connected to a detector, and the detectors are connected to a counter. You leave the room and come back - the counter shows 2. How do you determine which atom decayed first?
Thatâs a classical ambiguity, not a quantum ambiguity. It would be like if I placed a camera that recorded when cars arrived but I only gave you information on when it detected a car and at what time and no other information, not even providing you with the footage, and asked you to derive which car came first. You canât because thatâs not enough information.
The issue here isnât a quantum mechanical one but due to the resolution of your detector. In principle if it was precise enough, because the radiation emanates from different points, you could figure out which one is first because there would be non-overlapping differences. This is just a practical issue due to the low resolution of the measuring device, and not a quantum mechanical ambiguity that couldnât be resolved with a more precise measuring apparatus.
A more quantum mechanical example is something like if you apply the H operator twice in a row and then measure it, and then ask the value of the qubit after the first application. It would be in a superposition of states which describes both possibilities symmetrically so the wavefunction you derive from its forwards-in-time evolution is not enough to tell you anything about its observables at all, and if you try to measure it at the midpoint then you also alter the outcome at the final point, no matter how precise the measuring device is.
I see what youâre trying to get at. Itâs not that we can definitely know the state, itâs that we could build the experiment in such a way that we can definitely know the state - and by not building it this way weâre essentially deliberately âthrowing awayâ information about the final state.
Thanks for the explanation!
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