I was talking with my philosophy teacher about determinism, and I found myself wishing more and more that there was a scientist in the room that could help me get a more empirical, scientifically literate basis for what I am trying to understand.
My hypothesis about determinism, which impacts the way I view ethics in the world dramatically, is that every event is preceded by many different events which all cause each other, like a large clockwork in which every action has been determined since the beginning of time. This alone has been called into question, because there's different ideas of what causality is. There's newtonian - everything is like clockwork, einstein's relativity - he apparently still thought everything was clockwork, and now we have unpredictability, which as someone pointed out, could have non-local determinate causes.
My philosophy teacher is a scholar who publishes in plato, who teaches the philosophy class I am taking right now. He defines the difference between prescriptive and descriptive. I am basing what I say off of notes from our discussion, which I am still fuzzy on, but he says that when conditions are met, the laws cause certain things to occur. According to him, the laws aren't physical things, which I said seems like a semantic and rather solipsistic point. The laws, in my opinion, describe the nature of physical things.
He says in a prescriptive point of view, the laws are real, but they are not physical things. I would disagree. He also says that from a descriptive point of view, the laws are are our descriptions. He doesn't agree with the descriptive point of view, but he also says that it can't be the prescriptive point of view. This is why he doesn't believe in the idea of determinism. He says, the laws cause things to happen when the relevant conditions are met. Physical stuff, according to him, is forces, energy, and matter, but these things are not laws, laws govern these things when the relevant conditions are met. He uses the example of a pen hits a paper clip at a certain speed, the law will cause x transfer of momentum to occur.
We have gotten together twice, for about an hour each session to try to understand different ways of looking at causality. I am somewhat scientifically illiterate, because I can't do math to save my life. But I would really like to hear your perspective, and I only ask that you be patient and not berate me. I don't come to you with sanctimony, I come to you hoping to learn your (hopefully) informed, scientific opinion.
I've listened to this speech countless times, it was very influential to me as a teenager. The whole speech was in a song by the band sun devoured earth.
Brandon Taylor
Here are the notes my professor used to explain his position to me.
Ian Allen
This all seems like a bunch of semantics. Laws are descriptions of how things behave. The behavior is obviously real. If things behaved differently then the laws would be different. But what did this have to do with determinism?
Angel Williams
I talked to him after class today, and he responded to my question, which was how he could be neither a determinist nor a probabilist. I just started reading his response, but here it is with persons names cut out.
Jackson Reed
I really enjoy philsophers, because, unlike the average physics student, they're actually interested in a wider scala of topics.
Anyway; I have a hard time understanding what your problem is.
As for determinism; actually I've personally reconciled determinism with existentialism, perhaps in a rather pragmatic way. Determinism is beautiful on its own; it kind of explains why we have evolved into the conscious beings that we are in this large universe.
Advancing with physics however, has made my hard-deterministic view softer, though. The world is simply fundamentally weird (QM/relativity) and more and more I believe that scientific laws can only describe how a system evolves; it can never describe how the system is. Understanding all there is in a metaphysical sense is probably not even possible, which may or may not have to do with our brains that live in the scales that we live in (meterscale, secondscale etc.)
I should say that I don't understand your teachers view of physical laws. Does he have a background in physics? How do his considerations disproof determinism? There is arguments (often weak) against determinism but I'm not sure if this is one. Mother Nature always keeps track of all relevant conditions and should therefore mechanically evolve into its next state ad infinitum, Even if conditions change, this doesnt imply that the mechanical evolution would change (this disregards QM but the abundance of weirdities are too big to explain in one post - even getting a glimpse takes months)
A book written by one of the pioneers of QM and relatively, iirc. Most information is outdated, but the fundamentals are not. Especially the parts on relativety and entropy (the arrow of time) may be interesting to you.
Jackson Sanchez
Very interesting post. I will be processing what you said mentally. Thank you.
Brayden Barnes
As an egotistical brainlet who think he's good at science I think I can contribute. Science can only describe approximations of reality, like trying to find the area of a circle with a square grid. So a scientist isn't going to be able help much with determining if there's even a circle to measure or not, since all he does is count squares touching a circle he can't see. So the laws of physics as we understand them, and as we will ever understand them are somewhat inaccurate, and we can't find out if they inaccurately describe something real but immaterial or if they describe nothing at all. If we pretend that there's no inaccuracy in our laws though, we still don't know if they're real, and honestly I don't think any amount of thinking will get you to an answer. It's untestable and impossible to simply reason your way past human limits. At a certain point you just have to declare certain things as an assumption. That's not a problem though, since you have to have some assumptions to have a logic system anyways. Hope this helps.
John Wood
This seems rather weaselly. The laws describe how physical things cause other things. For example, the law of universal gravity describes how all masses attract each other. The law is not the cause of masses attracting each other, that is gravity itself. The law is describing gravity, a fundamental property of the universe. It is obvious, practically tautological, that the fundamental properties of the universe determine everything which goes on in it.
Let's assume that by "laws" he is referring to properties of how things behave. So his position is essentially like saying that the current distribution of matter and energy is explained solely by how energy and forces behave. But this is not entirely correct. We need energy to exist in the first place, or something physical which produces the energy, to explain how matter is the way it is. Specific physical objects being in a certain place and time are certainly part of the explanation. So I don't really understand why he's taking this position, other than to reject determinism and accept voluntary action.
When he talks about where reasons come from he makes a distinction between causes and conditions making something possible. I don't see the difference.
Julian Harris
If physical things are not causes, what is?
Neither physical things or the laws of physics are causal. The world as it is makes the world as it becomes. Without physical objects there can be no laws and vice versa. You can't have fluid mechanics in a vacuum.
Brody Ramirez
This was exactly my objection. I pointed out to him that the time space continuum is a thing. Gravity is a law, and physical objects are an inextricable part of these laws. Take, for instance, a space shuttle gaining more mass as it approaches the speed of light. This is because energy, mass, and gravity are all part of the same law. In this way, when you describe the laws of gravity, you can't say that physical things and laws are not the same thing. The laws describe the physical things, and the laws are the behavior of these physical things. Gravity and matter aren't separable, if they were, you could surpass the speed of light using propulsion. Whereas the only way to surpass the speed of light is the universe which expands faster than the speed of light apparently.
Jeremiah Martinez
Make no mistake: everything in this Universe is orderly, perfect, organized, because of the elegance of Mathematics. At the quantum level, everything is a matter of chance, of probabilities. There is no "randomness". So right off the bad, you can get rid of that idea that says things may be random. They aren't. There's always plenty of outcomes for any given measurement, in fact, there are infinite, but at the same time they're limited. Infinite possibilities within a short, finite spectrum if you may. Much like how there are infinite numbers between 0 and 1, but despite being infinite, those numbers can never be lesser than 0 or greater than 1. In case you have missed the track of words, let me remind you I'm talking about the so called quantum level. At the macroscopic level - and by macroscopic, I mean as big as or bigger than a small virus -, things become completely deterministic, because the many quantum possible outcomes cancel each other out. Let me explain. Think of it this way. Let's say you have two ideal dice. Should you roll them, it's very hard to guess which numbers you'll get. That's what happens at the quantum level. Now, suppose that you had, instead of just two, two quadrillion (2,000,000,000,000,000) dice. That's a lot of dice, and you very well could get rich simply from setting up a dice shop and crashing the market price of dice, but your curiosity speaks louder than your greed and so you roll all that dice. You might or might not be surprised to observe that the six possible results are evenly spread. Out of all the dice, 1/6 has rolled 1, 1/6 has rolled 2 .... and 1/6 has rolled 6. Of course, that's only approximately. But the more dice you roll, the closer the results will be to a perfect one sixth of the total dice. Finally, let me add that the people who say we have free will because of quantum mechanics are bullshitting, because, even if everything was probabilistic or even random, we still wouldn't have control over our own brains.
Luke Reyes
What I don't understand is that, even if physical objects and the law that governs them are causes, how that would give rise to the possibility of free will.
Ethan Jenkins
Remember that we weren't necessarily discussing free will. We were discussing determinism. The discussion of free will would follow, but we aren't there yet. I don't have a theory of mind myself, but since human beings are made of matter, and this matter is bound to physical laws no less than everything else around us, and I posit that determinism is a thing, I conclude that the human mind is part of a deterministic structure and that we have no free will. How you would apply his point of view to that, I'm not certain, but we were discussing determinism, not free will.
Easton James
>I would disagree. Looks like you should learn philosophy of science. Theories have non-trivial rules to work by. You can't disagree when a theory plays by its rules. You can only create a different theory. If you don't agree how platonism works, you can't fix, but you can replace it.
Brody Parker
Materialism can't have supernatural free will, but it can have natural free will. You're such a bluepilled normie.
Landon Morgan
I'm this, but I'd like to comment on that video; the video focusses on the chemical part. But the fact that your consciousness is an emerging property of a brain, should hint that something is going on. The fact that you happen to vividly experience, for an arbitrary amount of time, this weird mechanical evolution of the universe in the maybe relatively small time that conscious beings experience it this sharp at all, and that vividly experiencing is possible at all is weird.
Especially considering that we can now actually consider the hidden realities behind 'classical mechanics', so to speak. This on top of the studies of how life emerged from an energetic structure that happened to reproduce and eventually sustain itself (mRNA. Just considering yourself a bunch of atoms etc. is technically correct, but it too easily disregards the fact that it is atleast possible to even think about something called 'a free will'. To me this opens the doors to pursue virtues/activities like persistency, relationships and actively searching to learn (/existentialistic stuff), charachteristics that are partially disregarded by deterministic views.
Liam Sullivan
This is why we need a >>>/phi/ board without the the shit of /pol/ and Veeky Forums
Owen Baker
Scientifically, there is really no distinction or conflict, determinism is axiomatic - what would be the alternative? That doesn't mean there is no so-called "free will", though it's probably less mystical than the memey concept generally implies, remember than most of "you" amounts to an unconscious string of triggers and established neurological patterns. The mechanisms governing the physical are extremely complex and open to wide variation on even the slightest change.
In theory, the concept of everything just being some big chain of triggers that dictates the whole of the universe seems to be obviously true but reality is more complicated, perhaps it can be boiled down to just that, but the physical, the brain, the interactions between everything - all are so nuanced and complex as to not be entirely predictable or outwardly determined.
Us being within determinism may mean that the complexity allows the perspective of freedom and nondeterminism, to some degree, but the true nature of things, the absolute, could be beyond our grasp (as we are not outside of it). Determinism is true, our animalistic perspective can make it seem untrue. As we can't grasp how complex it is, at least not dynamically, so it just doesn't seem determined in such an absolute fashion.
Ian Lopez
To simplify. I mean that the mechanics of the universe are so complex as for a result of them (us) to not be able to grasp their full meaning and apply it to themselves/the world. It is physically impossible. Meaning that determinism is correct but so complex as to be practically nondeterminism (from our perspective).
Alternatively, the complexity itself retains determinism but affords true "free will" and other things.
Cameron Young
besides perfect circle don't even exist. pi is a mathematician's creation
Jace Cooper
did you even read the email before posting you moron? he clearly states he doesn't believe in libertarian free will.
