> But if we have no agency, nothing matters. There can be no morality: a criminal was always destined to commit a crime. It was never right for us to punish them, but that’s okay: we couldn’t have acted differently, so we shoulder no blame.
Right, and determinism seems likely to me to be correct, but I don't see the issue. Whether we'd like things to matter has no impact on whether they really do, but the obvious conclusion along the same lines that "saves" us is that you should act as if you believe in free will (e.g. enacting punishments) even if you don't. Either there is free will, so you behaved correctly, or there isn't, so you didn't really decide how to act anyway.
1-We do have machinery that performs a resolution of next action/thought/belief (based on external input, current state, etc.) and we possibly just sense that action as "choice"
2-It seems pretty unlikely that the resolution process could be cleanly deterministic and repeatable given quantum stuff, meaning some step in the resolution process hovering on the edge of two options could go either way depending on the brain's electromagnetic soup's current state.
3-Our emotions are critical for our survival, driving choices that help us short and long term, and it seems that one of those core drivers is a sense of agency. Even if we don't have free will in the magic sense of causing electrons (or whatever) to suddenly turn left to support our choice, it would still be critical for us to have a sense that our actions and efforts all matter, so those feelings are probably built into the system.
Note:
This assumes there is no special magic somewhere that defies our current understanding of the universe and it just hasn't been figured out yet.
The quantum stuff appears to me to very much be that the universe is deterministic if and only if it's deterministic. Like, if you imagine that we're all something like vibrational modes on an expanding "drum head" (which, as far as I know is very roughly basically what QFT says, but I've never actually studied it), then there's no issue as far as I know. The initial state of the universe set everything in motion, and the global geometry of the universe admits certain wave propagations or it doesn't. Could be that I just don't know enough, but I've always found the phrasing of "super-determinism" to be odd; obviously, if the universe is deterministic, you don't get to choose what experiments you run. That's just normal determinism.
Right, this is why you resolve act as if there is. If there isn't, then "you" didn't really resolve to do anything anyway, or at least it was inevitable that you would make that choice (for example that you would follow this line of reasoning) so it didn't matter. "You" weren't wrong because "you" weren't anything but an automaton.
If there really were such a thing as free will, whatever that means, then by acting like there is, you were acting correctly.
It's sort of like how in math, when you're dealing with an if statement, a false premise gives your conclusion for free. You only need to consider the case that you have a choice in the first place when deciding how you should act. Therefore you should act as if free will exists, even if deep down you really don't believe it does.
Basically "I should choose to act as if I have free will" really expands to "if I can choose how to act, then I should choose to act as if I have free will," which is then straightforward basic logic.
In smart psychopath Logic, because life is a repeated game and you will have moments of weakness and imperfections, so you would like the world to he in a moral equilibrium where even if you let your guard down for a moment you will not risk immediately be butchered by the other person. The game theory of collaboration and nice mess is pretty solid once you account for transaction costs, risk, repeated interactions etc.
For most people, given that they are part of a species who's superpower is collaboration at planet scale and who evolved accordingly, the hedonic pleasure of acting morally congruent and being embraced by a community, as well as hard wired tendency towards empathy does the rest of the trick. How you grow up and what trauma shaped your intellectual and emotional development will affect who you consider worthy of empathy and care ofc.
For me, I just can't falsify my experience that things do matter, that I make choices. The people in my life that I encounter seem to have this same experience.
There are less reductive forms of materialism. For the view of a Nobel prize physics laureate see A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down by Robert B. Laughlin. From the philosophy world, read Manuel DeLanda or Alicia Juarrero.
> In this view, our actions are predetermined too.
> But if we have no agency, nothing matters.
This is, listen carefully, just bollocks. More precisely it's a non sequitur because "predetermined" doesn't mean "no agency". That's what it would mean, sure, if your actions were predetermined by an evil puppetmaster. But ask two questions:
1. What are your actions predetermined by? It's you. That's what.
2. What, if you find this too constraining, do you want? What do you mean by free will, if not your actions being determined by your own mind? Exactly, you don't know, so stop complaining about nothing.
Yes, the universe is deterministic, boo fucking hoo. This doesn't mean you're some sort of robot slave, because it's your mind that is deterministic, and your mind, deterministically, probabilistically, makes choices. These are the only kind of choices that can possibly exist, which is why, to resume my starting theme, when you try to come up with any alternative thing a choice could be, you must necessarily talk bollocks.
Pre ... choose? No, you can choose. You are a thing that chooses. Why is everybody so hung up on determinism? What do you want choice to mean? Really I think it's just because "deterministic" sounds like "determined for you", but it doesn't mean that. Everything is deterministic, including things that choose, by which I mean people. You are a fully paid up (and incidentally deterministic) person with the (also deterministic) freedom to make choices.
I thought of another aspect, which I'm going to edit in here since it's gone quiet. People might be having misapprehensions about knowledge in the context of "predetermined". I mean to say that rather than thinking "puppetmaster" you might think "written in the stars", and that you're tied to a fate that could be discerned, divined, from the starting conditions. But nobody can do that. If you and the universe around you are a program, the only way to find out what the program does is to run the program. Then you think intelligently, weigh preferences, have gut feelings, and all that jazz, and that's how the outcome becomes apparent. Nothing is written legibly in the stars.
The only way your choices can be non-deterministic is when there is no cause for why you chose x over y. A lack of cause means that the choice was random; there was no reason why you chose x over y. But that’s not what people generally mean by free will: they want their choices to have been made for a reason (even if the reason is just “personal preference” or “I felt like it”). Reasons mean causes, so we are back to the choices being determined by those causes.
Even when one claims “I chose x over y because I felt like it”, there will be reasons why they felt like it. There is always a next “why” to ask, unless you put it down to pure randomness.
I don’t see how you can escape this. There are either causes, aka determination, or pure randomness, or a mix of both. Neither gives you free will in the naive or metaphysical-libertarianism sense. (Which is also why the probabilisticity of quantum mechanics doesn’t offer a way out.)
This isn’t specific to materialism, it’s a matter of logic.
I’ve read Schopenhauer but this is not complete in my view. He actually advocates for the will as a transcendental, escaping this dilemma.
I have been working on this quite a bit, maybe I can publish it.
One challenge with your approach is that decisions are frequently (if not always) multi-causal in origin, and the balance of influence of causation must be something we can weight in real time.
The bigger basic structural idea is that closures escape causal chains, and freewill is essentially what happens within a (specific type of) causation closure.
A further problem is attempting to enclose and limit reality within logic, which we know to be a finite rule system and subject to specific limitations as such.
Further, your same argument could be used to support the idea that causation doesn’t exist.
This doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t think of causes as discrete things, just like physical fields don’t consist of discrete strands in time; nevertheless the field equations completely determine what happens from one moment to the next.
If as you say you take a set of causes and contemplate a weight distribution on them that determines the outcome, then that weight distribution is just another thing that either has reasons for why it is the way it is, or it doesn’t and then is just random; or a mix of both.
> Further, your same argument could be used to support the idea that causation doesn’t exist.
How so?
I actually don’t think of causation as a fundamental notion, but as an emergent one. What’s fundamental are the consistency constraints that adjacent events are subject to.
> A further problem is attempting to enclose and limit reality within logic, which we know to be a finite rule system and subject to specific limitations as such.
I don’t agree that (a) logic is necessarily finite, and (b) if it is finite, that it would limit reality in any way that contradicts our observations.
Beginning at the end of your comment and working backward, what do you think of Gödel Escher Bach or even Logicomix? It isn’t really a matter of debate that you cannot use logic as a universal construction toolkit for a rational reality, it has already been proven. Gödel vs Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead etc.
How do you propose causation emerges exactly? You are a kind of relationist?
You seem to be conflating “doesn’t have reasons” with “is random” because your basis seems be something like a relational rationalist perspective, which I don’t know of as a thing that exists. I don’t believe I have encountered it before.
I can see that some aspects of your perspective make sense, but I don’t see how the aggregate holds together.
edit: I forgot to answer “how so”: your argument against free will seems to be that any choice is in response to a cause, and causes infinitely regress, therefore free will cannot exist.
Both move the choice (or the cause), out of you or me and into the origin of existence. It doesn’t cease to exist, really, it just moves. But your argument, used to argue for the lack of existence of choice, can be used to argue for the lack of existence of cause, because every cause is caused. The term becomes meaningless then, one static continuation.
My argument is that the infinite regress ends in you (and me), because of the details of our construction.
> In classical physics, the universe is deterministic: every action is a necessary consequence of what happened before. In this view, our actions are predetermined too.
Sure, but the deterministic chaos [1] arising within classical physics says that any predetermined actions depend on upon effectively unknowable aspects of initial conditions. Nothing probabilistic required.
Easiest example is anything dependent on turbulent fluids, which are found everywhere in the atmosphere and the oceans. Another place with turbulence is the human heart [2]. There's deterministic chaos lurking behind the oxygenation of every cell in your body.
Predetermined actions from a chaotic system are indistinguishable from free will. Occam's Razor suggests free will, being simpler and just as predictive, is the better model for human behavior.
Just because it's fun: Why is the universe like this? The anthropic principle [3]! Without fluid turbulence the other available diffusion mechanisms are too slow to evolve creatures like us. Literally, either turbulence is a classical physics PITA or you don't exist [4].
Author tries and fails to rationally argue that rational thinking is incorrect by pointing out that some people trying to think rationally have failed.
> Alas, the only flavor of philosophy that’s popular with techies is what I’d call edgelord utilitarianism — a collection of materialist, pseudo-mathematical beliefs favored by the SF Bay Area rationalist community.
Which is sad, because philosophy of technology does exist and is a young discipline in philosophy.
Philosophy of technology has existed since Plato and Aristotle. Every other word in their corpus is technē, which is why we call technology 'technology'. In every succeeding epoch the theory of the technological has been developed. It isn't clear there are 'disciplines in philosophy': there are only a few thousand researchers to begin with, on the scale of art history. I asked perhaps doubtful AI but it said that in AI there is an 'elite tier' of AI researchers of 5000 from maybe 100,000 total; the corresponding figure for philosophy was 500 out of 5000. The AI world could finance its own army of philosophers and it could be bigger than real philosophy, and no one would notice the dent on funds
> But if we have no agency, nothing matters. There can be no morality: a criminal was always destined to commit a crime. It was never right for us to punish them, but that’s okay: we couldn’t have acted differently, so we shoulder no blame.
Right, and determinism seems likely to me to be correct, but I don't see the issue. Whether we'd like things to matter has no impact on whether they really do, but the obvious conclusion along the same lines that "saves" us is that you should act as if you believe in free will (e.g. enacting punishments) even if you don't. Either there is free will, so you behaved correctly, or there isn't, so you didn't really decide how to act anyway.
Some thoughts:
1-We do have machinery that performs a resolution of next action/thought/belief (based on external input, current state, etc.) and we possibly just sense that action as "choice"
2-It seems pretty unlikely that the resolution process could be cleanly deterministic and repeatable given quantum stuff, meaning some step in the resolution process hovering on the edge of two options could go either way depending on the brain's electromagnetic soup's current state.
3-Our emotions are critical for our survival, driving choices that help us short and long term, and it seems that one of those core drivers is a sense of agency. Even if we don't have free will in the magic sense of causing electrons (or whatever) to suddenly turn left to support our choice, it would still be critical for us to have a sense that our actions and efforts all matter, so those feelings are probably built into the system.
Note: This assumes there is no special magic somewhere that defies our current understanding of the universe and it just hasn't been figured out yet.
The quantum stuff appears to me to very much be that the universe is deterministic if and only if it's deterministic. Like, if you imagine that we're all something like vibrational modes on an expanding "drum head" (which, as far as I know is very roughly basically what QFT says, but I've never actually studied it), then there's no issue as far as I know. The initial state of the universe set everything in motion, and the global geometry of the universe admits certain wave propagations or it doesn't. Could be that I just don't know enough, but I've always found the phrasing of "super-determinism" to be odd; obviously, if the universe is deterministic, you don't get to choose what experiments you run. That's just normal determinism.
Why does it matter how you "should" act if there is no free will. You are just going to act how your are going to act.
Right, this is why you resolve act as if there is. If there isn't, then "you" didn't really resolve to do anything anyway, or at least it was inevitable that you would make that choice (for example that you would follow this line of reasoning) so it didn't matter. "You" weren't wrong because "you" weren't anything but an automaton.
If there really were such a thing as free will, whatever that means, then by acting like there is, you were acting correctly.
It's sort of like how in math, when you're dealing with an if statement, a false premise gives your conclusion for free. You only need to consider the case that you have a choice in the first place when deciding how you should act. Therefore you should act as if free will exists, even if deep down you really don't believe it does.
Basically "I should choose to act as if I have free will" really expands to "if I can choose how to act, then I should choose to act as if I have free will," which is then straightforward basic logic.
In smart psychopath Logic, because life is a repeated game and you will have moments of weakness and imperfections, so you would like the world to he in a moral equilibrium where even if you let your guard down for a moment you will not risk immediately be butchered by the other person. The game theory of collaboration and nice mess is pretty solid once you account for transaction costs, risk, repeated interactions etc.
For most people, given that they are part of a species who's superpower is collaboration at planet scale and who evolved accordingly, the hedonic pleasure of acting morally congruent and being embraced by a community, as well as hard wired tendency towards empathy does the rest of the trick. How you grow up and what trauma shaped your intellectual and emotional development will affect who you consider worthy of empathy and care ofc.
For me, I just can't falsify my experience that things do matter, that I make choices. The people in my life that I encounter seem to have this same experience.
There are less reductive forms of materialism. For the view of a Nobel prize physics laureate see A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down by Robert B. Laughlin. From the philosophy world, read Manuel DeLanda or Alicia Juarrero.
> In this view, our actions are predetermined too.
> But if we have no agency, nothing matters.
This is, listen carefully, just bollocks. More precisely it's a non sequitur because "predetermined" doesn't mean "no agency". That's what it would mean, sure, if your actions were predetermined by an evil puppetmaster. But ask two questions:
1. What are your actions predetermined by? It's you. That's what.
2. What, if you find this too constraining, do you want? What do you mean by free will, if not your actions being determined by your own mind? Exactly, you don't know, so stop complaining about nothing.
Yes, the universe is deterministic, boo fucking hoo. This doesn't mean you're some sort of robot slave, because it's your mind that is deterministic, and your mind, deterministically, probabilistically, makes choices. These are the only kind of choices that can possibly exist, which is why, to resume my starting theme, when you try to come up with any alternative thing a choice could be, you must necessarily talk bollocks.
I do not understand how your argument works.
You cannot choose, but you can prechoose? You cannot choose, but your physical identity chose the moment it was deterministically brought into being?
What does choice even mean in this context?
Pre ... choose? No, you can choose. You are a thing that chooses. Why is everybody so hung up on determinism? What do you want choice to mean? Really I think it's just because "deterministic" sounds like "determined for you", but it doesn't mean that. Everything is deterministic, including things that choose, by which I mean people. You are a fully paid up (and incidentally deterministic) person with the (also deterministic) freedom to make choices.
I thought of another aspect, which I'm going to edit in here since it's gone quiet. People might be having misapprehensions about knowledge in the context of "predetermined". I mean to say that rather than thinking "puppetmaster" you might think "written in the stars", and that you're tied to a fate that could be discerned, divined, from the starting conditions. But nobody can do that. If you and the universe around you are a program, the only way to find out what the program does is to run the program. Then you think intelligently, weigh preferences, have gut feelings, and all that jazz, and that's how the outcome becomes apparent. Nothing is written legibly in the stars.
So you are saying it is deterministic but unknowable in advance.
This does not prevent someone from building a you that runs on a faster substrate and pre running you.
It also gets into sticky territory on responsibility. Are you responsible for your choices?
The only way your choices can be non-deterministic is when there is no cause for why you chose x over y. A lack of cause means that the choice was random; there was no reason why you chose x over y. But that’s not what people generally mean by free will: they want their choices to have been made for a reason (even if the reason is just “personal preference” or “I felt like it”). Reasons mean causes, so we are back to the choices being determined by those causes.
Even when one claims “I chose x over y because I felt like it”, there will be reasons why they felt like it. There is always a next “why” to ask, unless you put it down to pure randomness.
I don’t see how you can escape this. There are either causes, aka determination, or pure randomness, or a mix of both. Neither gives you free will in the naive or metaphysical-libertarianism sense. (Which is also why the probabilisticity of quantum mechanics doesn’t offer a way out.)
This isn’t specific to materialism, it’s a matter of logic.
It’s worth reading Shopenhauer on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Freedom_of_the_Will. “Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.”
I’ve read Schopenhauer but this is not complete in my view. He actually advocates for the will as a transcendental, escaping this dilemma.
I have been working on this quite a bit, maybe I can publish it.
One challenge with your approach is that decisions are frequently (if not always) multi-causal in origin, and the balance of influence of causation must be something we can weight in real time.
The bigger basic structural idea is that closures escape causal chains, and freewill is essentially what happens within a (specific type of) causation closure.
A further problem is attempting to enclose and limit reality within logic, which we know to be a finite rule system and subject to specific limitations as such.
Further, your same argument could be used to support the idea that causation doesn’t exist.
This doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t think of causes as discrete things, just like physical fields don’t consist of discrete strands in time; nevertheless the field equations completely determine what happens from one moment to the next.
If as you say you take a set of causes and contemplate a weight distribution on them that determines the outcome, then that weight distribution is just another thing that either has reasons for why it is the way it is, or it doesn’t and then is just random; or a mix of both.
> Further, your same argument could be used to support the idea that causation doesn’t exist.
How so?
I actually don’t think of causation as a fundamental notion, but as an emergent one. What’s fundamental are the consistency constraints that adjacent events are subject to.
> A further problem is attempting to enclose and limit reality within logic, which we know to be a finite rule system and subject to specific limitations as such.
I don’t agree that (a) logic is necessarily finite, and (b) if it is finite, that it would limit reality in any way that contradicts our observations.
Beginning at the end of your comment and working backward, what do you think of Gödel Escher Bach or even Logicomix? It isn’t really a matter of debate that you cannot use logic as a universal construction toolkit for a rational reality, it has already been proven. Gödel vs Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead etc.
How do you propose causation emerges exactly? You are a kind of relationist?
You seem to be conflating “doesn’t have reasons” with “is random” because your basis seems be something like a relational rationalist perspective, which I don’t know of as a thing that exists. I don’t believe I have encountered it before.
I can see that some aspects of your perspective make sense, but I don’t see how the aggregate holds together.
edit: I forgot to answer “how so”: your argument against free will seems to be that any choice is in response to a cause, and causes infinitely regress, therefore free will cannot exist.
Both move the choice (or the cause), out of you or me and into the origin of existence. It doesn’t cease to exist, really, it just moves. But your argument, used to argue for the lack of existence of choice, can be used to argue for the lack of existence of cause, because every cause is caused. The term becomes meaningless then, one static continuation.
My argument is that the infinite regress ends in you (and me), because of the details of our construction.
> In classical physics, the universe is deterministic: every action is a necessary consequence of what happened before. In this view, our actions are predetermined too.
Sure, but the deterministic chaos [1] arising within classical physics says that any predetermined actions depend on upon effectively unknowable aspects of initial conditions. Nothing probabilistic required.
Easiest example is anything dependent on turbulent fluids, which are found everywhere in the atmosphere and the oceans. Another place with turbulence is the human heart [2]. There's deterministic chaos lurking behind the oxygenation of every cell in your body.
Predetermined actions from a chaotic system are indistinguishable from free will. Occam's Razor suggests free will, being simpler and just as predictive, is the better model for human behavior.
Just because it's fun: Why is the universe like this? The anthropic principle [3]! Without fluid turbulence the other available diffusion mechanisms are too slow to evolve creatures like us. Literally, either turbulence is a classical physics PITA or you don't exist [4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
[2] https://cvphysiology.com/hemodynamics/h007
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
[4] Things one observes when procrastinating on a turbulence-related dissertation.
Author tries and fails to rationally argue that rational thinking is incorrect by pointing out that some people trying to think rationally have failed.
See also Gödel.
> Alas, the only flavor of philosophy that’s popular with techies is what I’d call edgelord utilitarianism — a collection of materialist, pseudo-mathematical beliefs favored by the SF Bay Area rationalist community.
Which is sad, because philosophy of technology does exist and is a young discipline in philosophy.
My degree required taking an Ethics in Computer Science course and I thought it was very interesting.
Philosophy of technology has existed since Plato and Aristotle. Every other word in their corpus is technē, which is why we call technology 'technology'. In every succeeding epoch the theory of the technological has been developed. It isn't clear there are 'disciplines in philosophy': there are only a few thousand researchers to begin with, on the scale of art history. I asked perhaps doubtful AI but it said that in AI there is an 'elite tier' of AI researchers of 5000 from maybe 100,000 total; the corresponding figure for philosophy was 500 out of 5000. The AI world could finance its own army of philosophers and it could be bigger than real philosophy, and no one would notice the dent on funds