That can be answered with yes or no, depending on how you look at it.
What's your answer?
Fire OlogistFebruary 07, 2025 at 21:34#9664460 likes
If we couldnt ever have made a different choice in the past, we didnt ever make any choice at all. So because of the semantics of the question, the answer has to be yes.
This is a good vehicle into the underlying question, do we ever choose our actions? Are we agents in our own story? Is there free will? Are we capable of halting the forces of necessity to deliberately influence our self-same lives?
I have to say yes because otherwise, I am not writing this post. If the forces of nature have led me to spell the word led without an a (as in lead, both of which follow the laws of grammar), and if I should remove me from the equations of this sentence, it seems to me I wouldnt have ever noticed a difference between nature and myself in the first place and would never have seen the choice between led and lead.
If all of science was completed and reported to everyone as from God, and this report said all moves by determined necessity and there are no choices I would still have to choose to believe this, or not, before the motion of this thread could go about its merry way.
Could anyone have made a different choice in the past than the ones they made?
Depends on several factors. Ignoring choice of deterministic interpretation of things or otherwise, in what way would this entity that makes a different choice in the past be you, or relative to what would that choice be 'different'? What ties you (that choses vanilla) to the possible T-S that choses chocolate?
I didn't vote because the question was vaguely worded.
If we couldnt ever have made a different choice in the past, we didnt ever make any choice at all.
Fire Ologist
This also depends on definitions, but you seem to be using one that doesn't distinguish choice from free choice, rendering the adjective meaningless.
If I cannot make a different choice then there is no choice. A choice, by definition, has to involve multiple variables and a deliberative agent whose action influences the outcome among those variables. Take away the agent, and there are no longer any variables identifiable only in a deliberating agent; Take away the variables and there is no choice. So choice involves both a deliberative (free reflecting) agent, and variables.
How else can we define the moving parts of a choice? Maybe I have no choice but to finish this paragraph with the word not. Maybe the last word of this post has been predicable for ten thousand years. But it seems to me it is more likely a consequence of me and my free choices, that could go any way I am capable of bringing to effect. Maybe not.
If I cannot make a different choice then there is no choice.
For example, a chess program has countless variables to ponder (at some length), and has (is) a deliberate agent whose action influences the outcome. If there was no chess program, the action would not be taken, so the influence is clearly there.
But...
given 20 identical programs with the exact same initial state, each will typically do the exact same thing.
They have choice, but not free choice since they can consider, but not actually make a different move. Your assertion presumes not choice, but free choice, which has a different definition (the one the OP uses).
Now take Schrodinger's cat (and a presumption of say Copenhagen interpretation). Given 20 identical cats in boxes with the exact same initial state, about half will die and half not. The cat thus has free choice (could have done otherwise), but sadly has no actual choice (no deliberate agency in the outcome). See the difference? One can have neither, both, or one but not the other.
You seem to be attempting to combine the two into one, with no distinction between the cases, in which case choice and free choice do not mean different things.
The OP (where's he gone?) seems to be leveraging the 'could have done otherwise' definition, not the definition you give, a 'deliberate selection from multiple options'.
Maybe the last word of this post has been predicable for ten thousand years.
I assure you otherwise. Too many people equate 'deterministic' with 'predictable'. The former is interpretation dependent (metaphysics), and the latter is very much known, and is part of fundamental theory.
Past cannot be changed, so you couldn't have made different choices for the past. But you are free to make choices for now and future.
This presumes an ontology where events are sorted into past, present, and future. Fine and dandy, but sans an empirical difference, I don't see the point.
But that's one version of determinism: All events share the same ontology, which means the Corvus in 2026 is no more capable of making a 'change' (as the word is used above) as the Corvus in 2020.
The usage of 'change' also implies that some future event is one thing, but later that same event is a different thing. That syntactically makes no sense. It isn't change if it was never something different.
Fire OlogistFebruary 07, 2025 at 23:37#9664730 likes
If I cannot make a different choice then there is no choice.
Fire Ologist
For example, a chess program has countless variables to ponder (at some length), and has (is) a deliberate agent whose action influences the outcome. If there was no chess program, the action would not be taken, so the influence is clearly there.
But...
given 20 identical programs with the exact same initial state, each will typically do the exact same thing. They have choice, but not free choice since they can consider, but not actually make a different move.
I never think we can clarify a human behavior at issue, like choosing, by analogizing this behavior with some other type of entitys behavior (like a chess program). We try to make black and white clarity by mixing gray with gray.
I dont see any substantial distinction between a choice and a free choice.
In your example of what the computer is doing before it makes a move, why call that a choice at all? It is operating on inputs to determine the only move it must make. It is not choosing, but calculating. You said yourself its next move is determined just as it is for the other 19 identical programs. There is no agent, so there are no variables, so there is no choice.
A really good chess player is effectively calculating just as well, and his or her moves may not be choices either.
I see calling what the program does choosing as personifying the program. And we dont yet know what choosing is or if we ever get to choose ourselves, so how are we to judge the program properly anyway?
Can you clarify the difference between a choice and a free choice, and deterministic mo choice using only human behavior as an example?
This presumes an ontology where events are sorted into past, present, and future. Fine and dandy, but sans an empirical difference, I don't see the point.
There are only three types of time perceptions we have. Past, Present and Future.
Past come from the memory i.e. remembering the events in the past. Present comes from our live perception happening now with consciousness for the now. Future comes from our imagination.
If you lost all your memories, then you don't have the past. If you can't imagine, then you don't have any ideas about the future. If you are not conscious, you don't have the present, past or future.
You can only make choices for now. You could also plan to make choices for your future using your imagination and thoughts.
Reply to flannel jesus l
Yes. I think it's part of having Asperger's that I notice all the ways a question can be looked at.
flannel jesusFebruary 08, 2025 at 13:22#9665640 likes
Reply to frank Well, I'm pretty sure if someone asks you a question, they just want to know how YOU look at it, not all the other ways it could be looked at lol.
Too many people equate 'deterministic' with 'predictable'. The former is interpretation dependent (metaphysics), and the latter is very much known, and is part of fundamental theory.
Yes, I agree with you on this. If we're right, it seems to me the whole question of free will vs. determinism becomes trivial, pointless.
I never think we can clarify a human behavior at issue, like choosing, by analogizing this behavior with some other type of entitys behavior (like a chess program).
I on the other hand avoid the anthropocentric view and broaden my list of examples in order to better understand. I find the chess program to be fundamentally no different than a human in this respect.
I dont see any substantial distinction between a choice and a free choice.
I noticed, which is why you couldn't tell apart those two very different definitions of choice. I do see a substantial distinction, and so the word 'free' becomes meaningful, and not just redundant.
In your example of what the computer is doing before it makes a move, why call that a choice at all?
Because it met your definition of it. I explained how when I brought up the example.
It is operating on inputs to determine the only move it must make.
No, there are many moves that it can make, and it is not compelled to choose any particular one. It evaluates each in turn and selects what it feels is a better one, all the same steps that a person does.The action (the evaluation and the selection) influences the outcome, just as your definition requires. If the choice were compelled, the program would not have influence over the outcome and would thus be unnecessary and the move would make itself, and those chess programs would be ever so much faster, and then it would not meet your definition.
It is not choosing, but calculating.
False dichotomy. Calculating (pondering, whatever) is part of the process leading to the eventual choice. It is not this or that, but rather this that leads to that.
You said yourself its next move is determined just as it is for the other 19 identical programs.
Computers tend to work best with deterministic components, even in the face of a possible non-deterministic physics. There is no 'select randomly' instruction such as is utilized by the cat in my example above. Human physiology is similar in this respect. There seems to be no components that amplify randomness or otherwise produce output that is not a function of prior state.
There is no agent
...
I see calling what the program does choosing as personifying the program.
Ooh, anthropomorphism again. Apparently many words only apply to humans and not anything else when doing the exact same thing. The racists used the same tactic to imply that people not 'them' were inferior.
A chess program makes its own moves, so it very much is the agent in those selections.
A really good chess player is effectively calculating just as well, and his or her moves may not be choices either.
Are we changing the definition again? Does a bad chess player make some sort of actual choice when the good one has no agency or something? Your definition wording doesn't seem to support that.
Can you clarify the difference between a choice and a free choice
Well choice is as you define it: The thing in question needs to influence the outcome (be part of, (be the primary) cause of it, given the relevant variables in the input state.
Free choice (as typically defined) means that the primary cause of the outcome did not follow from physical prior state. There is way more than one definition of free choice, but that's a common one, and it is quite distinct from your definition.
The OP doesn't mention the word 'free' at all, but does mention "could have done otherwise" which is an informal alternate definition of it.
Present comes from our live perception happening now
Actually it is impossible to perceive the present. You speak of the fairly immediate past, which is what is typically in our active perception at any given time.
You can only make choices for now.
Choosing is a process, and thus cannot happen in an instant, so choosing is spread out over some interval of time regardless of whether you assign unequal ontology to those moments or not.
Could anyone have made a different choice in the past than the ones they made? Truth Seeker
Unless the universe (of determinant forces and constraints on one) changes too, I don't think so.
Under any nondeterminist interpretation, one 'could have chosen differently', or even might not have faced the choice at all. It also works under some fully deterministic interpretations like MWI where all possible choices are made in some world.
The key seems to come down to the word 'anyone'. Is that person in some other world that chooses otherwise the same person as you? The answer to that is yes if you're the same person you were last week (different state of course), and no if there is no persistent identity, in which case it is hard to argue that anything makes a choice at all.
Yes, I agree with you on this. If we're right, it seems to me the whole question of free will vs. determinism becomes trivial, pointless.
1) Determinism has little to do with free will since the typical definition of free will doesn't become free if randomness is the case instead of determinism. Determinism also has at least 4 different definitions, so that is also unclear.
FW seems to be central to the dualist argument because they way choices to be made by a supernatural agent despite the fact that neither deterministic nor random physics supports that.
FW seems to be central to the dualist argument because they way choices to be made by a supernatural agent despite the fact that neither deterministic nor random physics supports that.
I don't see why my only choices are determinism, randomness, or supernatural agency. I think a better way to think of it is that the real world is run by randomness constrained by deterministic processes. I'm not sure what that does for free will.
Truth SeekerFebruary 08, 2025 at 18:53#9665940 likes
Reply to frank I picked "I don't know" because I don't know the answer. If I knew the answer, I would not have asked the question on this forum.
Truth SeekerFebruary 08, 2025 at 18:57#9665970 likes
Reply to Fire Ologist Even if all the choices made by all sentient living things are inevitable, we still experience making them. If I had the genes, environments, nutrients, and experiences that you have, would I not have typed your post and vice versa?
I don't think modal logic has any metaphysical import though. It's just about the way we think.
Well, yes. Same with modality.
We can think about how things might have been different. That's what "could" does in "Could anyone have made a different choice in the past than the ones they made?"
Truth SeekerFebruary 08, 2025 at 19:03#9665990 likes
Past cannot be changed, so you couldn't have made different choices for the past. But you are free to make choices for now and future.
I am not talking about changing the past. What determines who chooses what? If the choices are determined by genes, environments, nutrients and experiences, are the choices free? If I had the genes of a banana tree instead of my genes, could I have typed these words? I don't think so.
Truth SeekerFebruary 08, 2025 at 19:14#9666020 likes
Could anyone have made a different choice in the past than the ones they made?
Truth Seeker
Depends on several factors. Ignoring choice of deterministic interpretation of things or otherwise, in what way would this entity that makes a different choice in the past be you, or relative to what would that choice be 'different'? What ties you (that choses vanilla) to the possible T-S that choses chocolate?
I didn't vote because the question was vaguely worded.
If we couldnt ever have made a different choice in the past, we didnt ever make any choice at all.
Fire Ologist
This also depends on definitions, but you seem to be using one that doesn't distinguish choice from free choice, rendering the adjective meaningless.
What I am exploring here is whether our choices are inevitable or not. Are we free agents or are our choices determined by variables such as genes, environments, nutrients, and experiences?
We can think about how things might have been different. That's what "could" does in "Could anyone have made a different choice in the past than the ones they made?"
You're saying free will and determinism both come down to the way we think rather than metaphysics? I agree.
Truth SeekerFebruary 08, 2025 at 19:17#9666040 likes
Could anyone have made a different choice in the past than the ones they made?
Truth Seeker
Unless the universe (of determinant forces and constraints on one) changes too, I don't think so.
I think you are right.
Truth SeekerFebruary 08, 2025 at 19:18#9666050 likes
Terry Pratchet:Do you remember
I have a very good memory, thank you.
Do you ever wonder what life would have been like if youd said yes? said Ridcully.
No.
I suppose wed have settled down, had children, grandchildren, that sort of thing
Granny shrugged. It was the sort of thing romantic idiots said. But there was something in the air tonight
What about the fire? she said.
What fire?
Swept through our house just after we were married. Killed us both.
What fire? I dont know anything about any fire?
Granny turned around.
Of course not! It didnt happen. But the point is, it might have happened. You cant say if this didnt happen then that would have happened because you dont know everything that might have happened. You might think somethingd be good, but for all you know it could have turned out horrible. You cant say If only Id because you could be wishing for anything. The point is, youll never know. Youve gone past. So theres no use thinking about it. So I dont.
Counterfactuals are recondite. You cant say if this didnt happen then that would have happened because you dont know everything that might have happened.
I picked "I don't know" because I don't know the answer. If I knew the answer, I would not have asked the question on this forum.
Oh! From one point of view, if I had become a criminal, the resulting person wouldn't be me. My identity is made up of bits of my history. If I'd had a different history, I'd be a different person, maybe closely kin to me, like a cousin. Therefore I can't have a different history.
Or we could just look at it via modal logic. That's just looking at alternatives, nothing metaphysical.
Could anyone have made a different choice in the past than the ones they made?
We can consider how things would have been different if you had chose not to post your OP. You know this, and can readily bring to mind how things would be if you had gone for a walk rather than posting on the forums.
And that is all you are asking.
Unless you wanted to know if the universe were deterministic, in the way 180 seems to suppose. But then, what would that mean? That if we rolled the universe back to how it was before your post, and set it in motion again, would things always turn out exactly the same? But we know that the sort of infinite precision that is suggested here is not physically possible, from Heisenberg. Things would proceed differently.
Reply to frank That's not what the physics says, if that is what you are asking.
if I had become a criminal, the resulting person wouldn't be me
Then who became the criminal? "I" is a rigid designation, picking you out in every possible world, including those in which your nefarious self comes to the fore.
That's were Pratchet enters the equation.
Truth SeekerFebruary 08, 2025 at 19:41#9666140 likes
Reply to Banno I am trying to understand how choices are made and if our choices are inevitable or not. Could I have refrained from posting in this forum? I don't know. Could I have posted a different question? I don't know. Was my post inevitable? I don't know.
I'll go over the physics again, becasue I think it a point worth making.
The universe is not deterministic in the way Newtonian physics suggested. It's not that we could measure the position of everything in the universe to any arbitrary level of precession. If we measure the momentum of an object to a greater degree of precession, we loose precession in the measurement of it's position. We can't have both.
Supose we take the universe back to before Reply to Truth Seeker did the OP, and ask, if we did it again, would everything happen in the exact same way? And here we might be asking one of two different things. If you are asking us to take the universe back to the exact same state as it was before the OP, and set it rolling again, then physics says that the notion of "the exact same state" does not make sense, because there can be no such measurement of the state of the universe. But if you are imagining not a physical state but a modal state, the universe just as it was, then of course the exact same thing would happen again... becasue that is what you are supposing in your modal ruminations.
I am trying to understand how choices are made and if our choices are inevitable or not.
Yep. And the answer (at least in part) is to consider in a bit more detail what you are asking. You can consider how things would have been had you not posted the OP - you would not be reading this post, for one, and might be doing something much more gratifying. In that sense, of course you might have done otherwise than you actually did.
And then there is consideration of what you might do next. Will you finish reading this paragraph, or go do something else? You might do either, but you will have to wait to find out which you actually do. And only one or the other will actually occur; you can't both read this paragraph to the end and not read it to the end. Is it inevitable that you read this far? Well, my prose has kept you enthralled, I suppose, since here you are.
Then who became the criminal? "I" is a rigid designation, picking you out in every possible world, including those in which your nefarious self comes to the fore.
:grin: Yes, I'm aware that I'm giving voice to the problem that rigid designation was supposed to solve.
Your identity is your history. If you'd had a different history, you'd be a different person. It's true. Rigid designation only makes sense of certain turns of phrase, it doesn't cover all that we believe about identity.
If I'd had a different history, I'd be a different person, maybe closely kin to me, like a cousin. Therefore I can't have a different history.
is a tautology, because you are now identifying yourself as your history, not as frank. All you are saying is that the person who did not become a criminal did not become a criminal.
Reply to Banno
Well, I'm saying the person who didn't become a criminal, couldn't have become a criminal. It's more than a tautology, although I'll grant, not much more.
Truth SeekerFebruary 08, 2025 at 20:32#9666300 likes
Reply to Truth Seeker No, you didn't do otherwise. But you can give consideration to how things woudl be had you done otherwise.
Was that inevitable? Well, what does 'inevitable" do? It's origin is "not avoidable", and now that you have read that paragraph it is unavoidable that you read it. But you still might not have read it, and this thread might then be shorter.
So the answer to "Could anyone have made a different choice in the past than the ones they made?" is that yes, it makes sense to consider how things might have been.
Are we free agents or are our choices determined by variables such as genes, environments, nutrients, and experiences?
Depends on one's definition of 'free'. A compatibilist would say yes even if physics is fully deterministic, but a compatibilist might have a completely different definition of 'free' than somebody wanting to rationalize a different view.
A better definition is 'not compelled by something not you'. Nothing in a deterministic universe compels a different decision than the one you want. Hence compatibilism.
OK, your second quote there implies that 'free' means at least "not determined by that list of variables", in which case probably not, but why in the world would you want that kind of 'free'? Sounds like a formula for horrible choice making.
If I had the genes of a banana tree instead of my genes, could I have typed these words? I don't think so.
Your genes influence your general makup (what you grew up to be), but are for the most part not consulted in any way for making a particular decision.
If you were conceived with banana genes, then you'd have grown up into a banana plant. But if your human genes were all suddenly switched into banana genes shortly before ordering ice cream, you'd probably pick the same flavor, and only later get sick and die because you are failing as a banana plant. Not a biologist, so I don't know how fast it would happen, but it would very much happen.
If I had the genes, environments, nutrients, and experiences that you have, would I not have typed your post and vice versa?
To me, that sounds like 'if nothing was different, then would anything different happen?'. What exactly is different when you say those words? You seem to have left nothing out. What is being swapped here?
What I am exploring here is whether our choices are inevitable or not.
This has to do with which interpretation of physics (if any of the known ones) happens to be the case. In some, yes, all inevitable.There are several definitions of 'determined' and several of them need to be not the case for the sort of 'free' that you seem to have in mind. Most non-deterministic interpretations are alternatively fundamentally random, which doesn't allow any more freedom than a non-random interpretation. Rolling dice is a very poor way to make decisions that matter, which is why there are no structures in human physiology that leverage natural randomness. And there very much would be such structures if there was useful information to be found in it. Evolution would not ignore any advantage like that.
I think a better way to think of it is that the real world is run by randomness constrained by deterministic processes.
No idea what that means.
Truth SeekerFebruary 08, 2025 at 20:43#9666330 likes
Reply to Banno Are the choices we make not determined by our genes, environments, nutrients, and experiences? If they are determined, then wouldn't identical choices result from identical variables?
Truth SeekerFebruary 08, 2025 at 20:49#9666340 likes
Reply to noAxioms If I had the genes of a banana tree instead of my genes, I would indeed have grown up to be a banana tree instead of an adult human provided I had the appropriate environment and nutrients. Since banana trees are not sentient, they can't experience anything. I am trying to work out if anyone deserves any credit or blame for their choices. If the choices we make are the products of variables we didn't choose e.g. genes, environments, nutrients and experiences, then how can we be credited or blamed for anything?
Sure. If your genes were different, you might have acted differently. If your environment were different, you might not have had access to this web site. If you had skipped breakfast, you might have been too tiered to bother posting. That's not to say that even if your genes had been different, you may have acted in the very same way. If your environment had been different, you may have changed it so as to gain access to this site. Had you skipped breakfast, you might nevertheless have still made the OP.
"...they are determined" just means that identical choices would result in the same outcome. So yes, if they are determined, then identical choices would result from identical variables.
See how much how you ask the question sets up the answer you get?
Truth SeekerFebruary 08, 2025 at 20:56#9666380 likes
There are two ways, both impractical to (currently) impossible. First one could predict with 100% accuracy, outcomes from detailed knowledge of the brainstate before the "decision" was made or second, if you could set up more than one example of identical brainstates then demonstrate that they always make the same "decision".
However, in my opinion, there are too many examples of "close enough" scenarios of the second situation resulting in wildly different outcomes to personally believe in Determinism.
Under any nondeterminist interpretation, one 'could have chosen differently', or even might not have faced the choice at all. It also works under some fully deterministic interpretations like MWI where all possible choices are made in some world.
The OP raises whether or not it's possible to 'change the past' of the actual world (i.e. retroactively making a choice different from the choice that already has been made); imo counterpart choices in 'parallel / possible worlds' are not relevant to the question at hand.
I am not talking about changing the past. What determines who chooses what? If the choices are determined by genes, environments, nutrients and experiences, are the choices free?
Choice itself implies the act of choosing was made by the person and the person's free will.
If I had the genes of a banana tree instead of my genes, could I have typed these words? I don't think so.
Banana tree gene is irrelevant premise for your conclusion. It makes no sense at all. There are many other reasons why you typed the post, other than your genes. But most of all, it was your free will which typed your posts.
Banana tree gene is irrelevant premise for your conclusion. It makes no sense at all. There are many other reasons why you typed the post, other than your genes. But most of all, it was your free will which typed your posts.
If I had the genes of a banana tree, instead of my human genes, I would have grown into a banana tree, provided I was in the appropriate environment and received the appropriate nutrients. Since no banana tree is sentient and types in English, it would have been impossible for me to post anything on this forum.
What do you mean by free will? My will is certainly not free from my genes, environments, nutrients and experiences. I think my will is both determined and constrained by my genes, environments, nutrients and experiences.
If I had the genes of a banana tree instead of my genes
I answered that query as best I could. It makes no sense to ask (if X happened to be not-X, what would happen?). So of course a tree doesn't make the same decisions as a person, but I don't see how that's relevant to the topic.
I am trying to work out if anyone deserves any credit or blame for their choices.
Of course they do. Free choice is not needed at all for that. Common misconception. It is only needed for external responsibility (like responsible to some entity not part of the causal physics), but it is not needed to be held responsible by say my society, which IS part of the universe.
If the choices we make are the products of variables we didn't choose e.g. genes, environments, nutrients and experiences, then how can we be credited or blamed for anything?
Because it's not those variables that made the choice, it is how you process them into the chosen selection that matters.
The OP raises whether or not it's possible to 'change the past' of the actual world (i.e. retroactively making a choice different from the choice that already has been made)
I didn't read it that way. No explicit mention of retrocausality, only the proposal that it might have possibly evolved differently from some given prior state. That answer is, as I said, a matter of interpretation. BTW, any non-local interpretation allows some retrocausality, but does not allow information to go back. So some occurrence might be a function of some event that has not yet happened (interpretation of delayed choice experiments), but a message cannot be sent to the past by such a mechanism, and to 'change the past' would seem to require the latter ability.
imo counterpart choices in 'parallel / possible worlds' are not relevant to the question at hand.
It is a different evolution of some same initial state. I find that relevant, but since that person in the other world is arguably not 'you', then 'you' didn't do the other thing. You can't both have chosen both vanilla and chocolate (twist is a third choice, not 'doing otherwise').
Truth SeekerFebruary 08, 2025 at 22:27#9666620 likes
Because it's not those variables that made the choice, it is how you process them into the chosen selection that matters.
It's the variables (genes, environments from conception to the present, nutrients from conception to the present and experiences from the womb to the present) that determine my perceptions, thoughts, emotions, values, words and actions. For example, if I had the genes of a banana tree instead of my genes, I would never have been sentient and hence I would never have been able to think any thoughts. If aliens kidnapped me when I was a baby and placed on the surface of Venus, I would have died from the heat. If I was deprived of all nutrients when I was a zygote, I would never have lived long enough to become a human who can post messages online. If I never experienced learning the English language, I would not have been able to post in English on this forum. As you can see from my examples, my choices are the products of variables.
If I had the genes of a banana tree, instead of my human genes, I would have grown into a banana tree, provided I was in the appropriate environment and received the appropriate nutrients. Since no banana tree is sentient and types in English, it would have been impossible for me to post anything on this forum.
No humans have banana tree gene. What is the point of telling us that? It is irrelevant point, and there is no logical link for what you are claiming.
What do you mean by free will? My will is certainly not free from my genes, environments, nutrients and experiences. I think my will is both determined and constrained by my genes, environments, nutrients and experiences.
Your idea of free will doesn't have boundary or definition, and it is not a correct concept. "genes, environments, nutrients and experiences" are not relevant elements for having free will.
Truth SeekerFebruary 08, 2025 at 22:33#9666650 likes
Reply to Corvus My point is not irrelevant. My point is that my choices are not free from my genes, environments from conception to the present, nutrients from conception to the present and experiences from the womb to the present. If you went back in time and altered any of the variables, you would also change my choices.
Reply to Truth Seeker Free will means that you are free to choose on a particular matter from what you are given and as a living being, be it gene, environments, nutrients or whatever the case.
Truth SeekerFebruary 08, 2025 at 22:37#9666670 likes
Reply to Corvus I am not denying that I have a will. I am saying that my will is not free from determinants and constraints.
Reply to Truth Seeker Using the concepts without implied boundaries and definitions within the concepts will cause confusions like that. Philosophical investigation is to point out these misuses of the concepts.
I am not denying that I have a will. I am saying that my will is not free from determinants and constraints.
Well, that is a misunderstanding the concept free will, I am afraid. You have free will. If you didn't have free will, you would not have typed your posts. :nerd: I am sure that no one was forcing you to type your posts. You are typing your posts by your free will the now. And I am too.
Truth SeekerFebruary 08, 2025 at 22:41#9666720 likes
Well, that is a misunderstanding the concept free will, I am afraid. You have free will.
I am quoting the Merriam-Webster dictionary: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/free%20will
"noun
1
: voluntary choice or decision
I do this of my own free will
2
: freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes or by divine intervention"
Our choices can be voluntary but they are not free from determinants and constraints.
Our choices can be voluntary but they are not free from determinants and constraints.
Those are not related to philosophical idea of free will. Constraints and determinants are the properties of your own being. They are part of your essence.
Truth SeekerFebruary 08, 2025 at 22:47#9666740 likes
Those are not related to philosophical idea of free will. Constraints and determinants are the properties of your own being. They are not directly related to free will.
Yes, they are. The second meaning of 'free will' is the "freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes". Our choices are never free from prior causes such as our genes, our environments from conception to the present, our nutrients from conception to the present and our experiences from the womb to the present. While we make voluntary choices, no one chooses their genes, their early environments, their early nutrients and their early experiences. As older children and adults we have limited choices about our environments, nutrients and experiences but even these limited choices are never free from the variables of genes, environments from conception to the present, nutrients from conception to the present and experiences from conception to the present.
Nothing can be illustrated by proposing a contradiction: 'if X was not X' is a contradiction. Unless of course you think there is a second thing that could 'be' either a person or possibly a tree or a shadow or whatever. Just trying to make syntactic sense of a comment like that. The wording implies a sort of bias of the existence of something that you are 'being', the same sort of implication of the lyrics "I wish that I could be Richard Corey" (Simon & Garfunkel), the latter of whom is a reasonably close neighbor of mine.
If aliens kidnapped me when I was a baby and placed on the surface of Venus, I would have died from the heat.
Better example. Not sure what it illustrates, but at least it's not a contradiction. The point being made is still illusive. Your choices are a product of those variables, yes. It is also a product of your reasoning, which is the variable that makes you responsible for them and doesn't make the shadow responsible for depriving a plant of sunlight.
Could anyone have made a different choice in the past than the ones they made?
Unclear question. Are you asking if determinism is the case, and therefore the choice made (I don't believe there is a 'the past' as distinct from 'not the past') is an inevitability of some initial state of the universe? Or are you perhaps asking if the agent that makes a different choice is still considered to be the same agent as yourself? Or asking something entirely different?
About definitions: I have proposed a small list of definitions of 'free choice' as distinct from choice that isn't free. I've also claimed at least 4 different kinds of determinism, but have not listed them in this topic. You've not clarified which ones are what you're talking about or not.
Fire OlogistFebruary 09, 2025 at 06:13#9667220 likes
Apparently many words only apply to humans and not anything else when doing the exact same thing.
No one can clearly state what they are doing when they claim to make a choice - its a few thousand year old debate. So how can anyone say this yet to be determined thing called choosing is doing the exact same thing as anything else?
In order for the program to make a move, it needs to have been given its programming; there need be no agent inserted into the program so that the chess pieces move. Once the program moves a piece, if you deconstructed the cause of that move, you could all the code and never see any agent influenced anything.
Maybe the same is true for people. But then there is no such thing as choosing (because there is no agency).
Calculating (pondering, whatever) is part of the process leading to the eventual choice.
Then you assert a dichotomy, a distinction, between calculating, which is a process before, and choice which would come after (eventually). So its not a false dichotomy by what you say. When a program is done calculating, it has no choice but to display the answer or make the move. Choice is something else than the calculations that might precede it.
The OP doesn't mention the word 'free' at all, but does mention "could have done otherwise" which is an informal alternate definition of it.
I still dont see a distinction between what a choice is, and what a free choice is. If something is determined by a prior physical state, its determined, so it cant be the result of a choice.
Choice is a pickle. But if we have the ability to make a choice, we must be a free agent in some sense. Otherwise, we are playing word games to make ourselves think our choices (or programmatic choices) exist.
Fire OlogistFebruary 09, 2025 at 06:25#9667240 likes
If I had the genes, environments, nutrients, and experiences that you have, would I not have typed your post and vice versa?
That is the question.
I have those genes, environments, etc.
So is it the same question to ask myself given all that has preceded me, would I do anything else besides type this post? Could I do anything else besides repeat your words would I not have typed your post ?
So since I am the same as me, does it help me to understand a moment when I choose? It doesnt. I still dont understand how I am free to choose, nor how these words here are determined. Neither are clear.
My current answer is that, somehow, our brains kick out an awareness of awareness - we are once removed from ourselves (which gives us the concept of self to look back on). We can reflect. This happens outside of the normal causal chain, and builds a space for choice. This is such a fragile happening, environments and nutrients etc are suspended with it, and so our choice comes from this new space outside of ourselves (from nowhere). So we build the free agent we are in the act of asserting a choice in the causal chain. We are not free to choose until we just choose.
Am I making sense? To you? Because Im barely making sense to me.
Yes, they are. The second meaning of 'free will' is the "freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes".
When you say making choices, it necessitates options. In other words, you could have made choices because there were options or alternative decisions.
All the things you come up with as determinants and the prior causes don't allow you to have options. Therefore they are irrelevant for making choices.
Genes, environments and nutrients are not philosophical concepts. They are the concepts in Genetics, Sociology and Biology, which has nothing to do with philosophical ideas.
flannel jesusFebruary 09, 2025 at 10:27#9667530 likes
Reply to frank is that what your first reply did? It didn't look like it was looking at ANY possible answers
Genes, environments and nutrients are not philosophical concepts. They are the concepts in Genetics, Sociology and Biology, which has nothing to do with philosophical ideas.
Genes, environments, nutrients and experiences are variables which determine and constrain our choices. They are real and their effects on our choices are real.
Truth SeekerFebruary 09, 2025 at 12:47#9667630 likes
I have proposed a small list of definitions of 'free choice' as distinct from choice that isn't free. I've also claimed at least 4 different kinds of determinism, but have not listed them in this topic. You've not clarified which ones are what you're talking about or not.
We make voluntary choices (e.g. my choice to post on this forum was voluntary) but we don't make choices that are free from determinants and constraints (e.g. my choice to post on this forum was both determined and constrained by my genes, environments, nutrients, and experiences). Do you understand what I have said?
Please tell me more about the 4 different kinds of determinism. Thank you.
I agree that options are real. I have been in mazes but not labyrinths.
Then you can always choose to do otherwise if you agree that options are real. The example of a maze is one. Think of a situation in which you have plenty of money but you are unsure about investing in the market. There are many examples in our lives in which we are unsure about the situations. This means that options in such situations are real so you can always choose to do otherwise.
We make voluntary choices (e.g. my choice to post on this forum was voluntary) but we don't make choices that are free from determinants and constraints (e.g. my choice to post on this forum was both determined and constrained by my genes, environments, nutrients, and experiences). Do you understand what I have said?
I suppose. A frog (or a banana) would have made different choices, even if positing if some sort of 'I' was one of those things makes no sense at all.
Please tell me more about the 4 different kinds of determinism. Thank you.
I actually came up with six, but the first four are the important ones.
1) determinism.as not-dualism
I googled 'determinism' and got this: "all events in the universe are caused by prior events or natural laws ". This is probably the primary definition used when asserting a dichotomy between determinism vs dualistic free will, the latter being defined as choices made by supernatural causes. The word, used in this way, seems to be a synonym for naturalism.
This sort of free will is required to be held responsible by any entity not part of the natural universe (God). It is in no way required for internal responsibility (to say society).
There are a couple that come from science, two from quantum interpretations, which is deemed deterministic if it doesn't involve fundamental randomness or 'god rolling dice' as Einstein put it.
2) Bohmian mechanics:
This is a hard deterministic interpretation that says that the universe is in a defined state at a given time (few other interpretations accept that), and that subsequent states yield one inevitable result. The state of the entire universe matters including future states since retrocausality is not ruled out. It posits hidden variables to resolve conflicts.
3) MWI
Everett's postulate is that a closed system evolves according to the Schrodinger equation, which is a fully deterministic equation. Thing is, this results in all possibilities existing, so technically an agent makes every possible choice, not just one.
4) Block universe
This view says that all events share the same ontology and thus there is no sorting into ontologically distinct categories of past, present and future. If all events exist equally, there is no way the evolution of events could be otherwise, thus every state is an inevitability.
5) Classical physics
Classical physics (Newtons laws, basic mechanics) is fully deterministic since all the equations are time reversible. There is no randomness to it anywhere. This one can be discounted because it has been proved that our universe cannot be fundamentally classical.
Edit: Wrong! Classical physics has actually been shown nondeterministic, hence should not be on my list at all.
Norton's dome is a demonstration of the indeterminacy of Newtonian physics.
6) Omniscience:
If there is an omniscient entity, then what it knows is technically an inevitability or the entity wouldn't actually be omniscient. The church has a way to explain its way around their assertion of these seemingly contradictory concepts, perhaps very similar sort explanation that discounts your suggestion above that choices made via naturalistic processes constitutes them being constrained, something with which I do not agree.
how can anyone say this yet to be determined thing called choosing is doing the exact same thing as anything else?
But you're implying that it must be the case that it is fundamentally different when you say "I see calling what the program does choosing as personifying the program". That was what I was balking at. Empirically, if I cannot see my opponent, I cannot tell if I am playing a human or not (hence 'doing the exact same thing'), so the usage of the word 'choose' is appropriate in either case.
In order for the program to make a move, it needs to have been given its programming; there need be no agent inserted into the program so that the chess pieces move.
All true of yourself as well. Besides, most chess playing programs don't move physical pieces, and if they do, it's an add-on (a sort of assistant), not part of the process doing the choosing (wow, just like yourself again).
Maybe the same is true for people. But then there is no such thing as choosing (because there is no agency).
Ah, so 'agency' is another one of these anthropomorphic words that is forbidden to other entities. I cannot base logic on such biases.
When a program is done calculating, it has no choice but to display the answer or make the move. Choice is something else than the calculations that might precede it.
Agree. The choice seems to be the result, possibly the output of the process, especially when it is cleanly delimited such as a chess move. A machine could choose not to display its choice of move, but that would be a bad choice since it would lose, so it seems optimal in most cases to make the move quickly. I can think of exceptions to that, but they're rare. A human is more likely to make that choice than a machine. I even witnessed exactly that a couple days ago.
I still dont see a distinction between what a choice is, and what a free choice is.
Of course. You chose your definition that way.
But if we have the ability to make a choice, we must be a free agent in some sense.
Ah, you use the word 'free' despite the word having no distinct meaning to you. Why didn't you just say "we must be an agent'? You already put that word on the human-only list above. Now you say 'free agent' like that is distinct from just 'agent'. Be a little consistent if you're going to take this stance
Fire OlogistFebruary 09, 2025 at 17:22#9668060 likes
A choice is what I call the result of choosing. Not any result of a calculating process. Choosing, if it exists, entails an agent who makes a free, deliberate selection among variables.
The program is not able to generate any other results, because it is not an agent capable of choosing which variable result to generate. There is always, only one move the program can make. So there is either no variables to select, or there is no agent. In the case of a program, there is no agent.
I still dont see a distinction between what a choice is, and what a free choice is.
Of course. You chose your definition that way.
Or you didnt explain the distinction you see well enough for my thick skull.
The word choice, to me, entails a free agent presented with variables who acts by selecting one variable. So saying free choice is redundant, as freedom is a necessary component of any choice.
Above where you defined choice and then defined free choice differently, your definition of a mere choice was, to me, the definition of a deterministic outcome (so not a choice at all). You didnt define choice versus a free choice, you defined a deterministic outcome versus any choice (which always includes freedom, if choice exists at all.)
flannel jesusFebruary 09, 2025 at 17:25#9668070 likes
Reply to frank my thoughts are, they could have made a different choice if they counterfactually had wanted to.
Do you think your view needs justification? If so, would you share it?
Probably, but I think it's pretty intuitive. Most people have some kind of model of causality. Counterfactual statements like mine are just the basic idea of applying the same kind of causality but changing some of the preceding conditions.
You can apply - and verify - those kind of counterfactual statements to physics simulations. "This happened this time, but if counterfactually I changed the simulation to have this bit instead, this would have happened." You could make that statement about a physics simultaion, and then you can test it. And sometimes, those statements will be right! And sometimes wrong.
Of course we don't have the straight-forward ability to test our counterfactual statements about this world, but it doesn't seem remarkably controversial to me. In fact it's part of every-day speech for most people. "That wouldn't have happened if such-and-such".
Of course we don't have the straight-forward ability to test our counterfactual statements about this world, but it doesn't seem remarkably controversial to me. In fact it's part of every-day speech for most people. "That wouldn't have happened if such-and-such".
So your view is primarily founded on common sense, right? The free will thesis reflects the way we commonly think and speak. I agree that it does. Although, the deterministic view does also. You mentioned that when you think of alternative histories, you're imagining a change in preceding conditions. Such a change would appear to imply a chain of preceding changes until we've basically replaced our universe with a different one. How do you address that?
flannel jesusFebruary 09, 2025 at 19:07#9668280 likes
Reply to frank just imagine a universe that started last Thursday.
One could also imagine a godlike figure reaching in and changing a couple individual things
just imagine a universe that started last Thursday.
One could also imagine a godlike figure reaching in and changing a couple individual things
The Thursday angle do much for the logic which says that if you'd done differently, the whole universe would have to be different from this one.
Or you could have a Sky Daddy intervene. :grin:
flannel jesusFebruary 09, 2025 at 19:36#9668340 likes
Reply to frank in either case, counterfactuals work for a causal view of the world.
See, you can view the world as 2 things: the way the world operates, and the facts (or state) on which it does those operations. So you can reasonably say, if the state were counterfactually like X instead of what it was, then Y would have been the causal result. As long as "the way the world operates" is treated as a constant, then you can treat the state as a variable.
I agree that options are real. I have been in mazes but not labyrinths.
Truth Seeker
Then you can always choose to do otherwise if you agree that options are real. The example of a maze is one. Think of a situation in which you have plenty of money but you are unsure about investing in the market. There are many examples in our lives in which we are unsure about the situations. This means that options in such situations are real so you can always choose to do otherwise.
6 hours ago
I am not convinced. I have been carrying out experiments on myself for many years to see how choices are made. Every single experiment showed me that the choices arise as a result of the interactions of four groups of variables. These groups of variables are genes, environments from conception to the present, nutrients from conception to the present and experiences from conception to the present. I am 99.(an infinite number of 9s)% certain that all our choices are inevitable.
I am 100% certain of the following:
1. I am conscious.
2. I am typing in English.
3. I am not all-knowing.
4. I am not all-powerful.
5. I change.
6. I know concepts e.g. what a square or circle or triangle is.
7. I know apparent facts about reality e.g. the Earth orbits the Sun, the Moon orbits the Earth.
8. I know how to walk, run, eat, drink, cook, shop, work, read, write, type, go to the toilet, cycle, swim, etc.
9. I can't do lots of things I really want to do e.g. go back in time and prevent all suffering, inequality, injustice, and deaths and make all living things forever happy.
10. I do some things even though I don't want to do them. Here are some things I have done, currently do or will do even though I don't want to do them:
1. Breathe
2. Eat
3. Drink
4. Sleep
5. Dream
7. Pee
8. Poo
9. Fart
10. Burp
11. Sneeze
12. Cough
13. Age
14. Get ill
15. Get injured
16. Sweat
17. Cry
18. Suffer
19. Snore
20. Think
21. Feel
22. Choose
23. Be conceived
24. Be born
25. Remember some events that I don't want to remember
26. Forget information that I want to remember
27. Die
I am almost 100% certain of the following:
1. I and all the other organisms currently alive will die. Every second brings all organisms closer to death.
2. My body, other organisms, the Earth and the Universe really exist and they are not part of a simulation or hallucination or dream or illusion.
3. Other organisms e.g. humans, cows, dogs, cats, chickens, pigs, lions, elephants, butterflies, whales, dolphins, etc. are sentient beings who feel pain.
4. Being a non-consumer is more ethical than being an autotroph, being an autotroph is more ethical than being a vegan/herbivore, being a vegan is more ethical than being a vegetarian, and being a vegetarian is more ethical than being an omnivore or carnivore.
5. Gods do not exist.
6. Souls do not exist.
7. Reincarnation does not happen.
8. Resurrection does not happen.
10. Organisms evolved and were not created by God or Gods.
11. 99.9% of all the species to evolve so far on Earth became extinct in 5 mass extinctions long before humans evolved.
12. Humans and other organisms make choices but they are not free from determinants and constraints. Our choices are determined and constrained by our genes, environments, nutrients, and experiences. The reason I have put this one in the almost certain category is that it is possible, albeit extremely unlikely, that bodies, genes, cells, stars, planets, moons, galaxies, universes do not actually exist. These things could be part of a simulation or dream or hallucination or illusion I am experiencing. It is impossible to know about this with 100% certainty. I could be a solipsistic soul experiencing the illusion of being in a human body on a planet in a universe or I could be a body without any soul - I don't know these things for sure, hence I am an agnostic. There are many hypotheses that can't be tested e.g. simulation hypothesis, illusion hypothesis, dream hypothesis, hallucination hypothesis, solipsism hypothesis, philosophical zombie hypothesis, panpsychism hypothesis, deism hypothesis, theism hypothesis, pantheism hypothesis, panentheism hypothesis, etc. Just because a hypothesis can't be tested it does not mean it is true or false. It just means that it is currently untestable.
What are your thoughts about the above thoughts of mine?
Our choices can be voluntary but they are not free from determinants and constraints.
... and also not free of consequences. :100:
Truth SeekerFebruary 09, 2025 at 20:57#9668510 likes
Reply to noAxioms Thank you for telling me more about the different types of determinism. Quantum indeterminacy is irrelevant because at the macroscopic level, all the quantum weirdness (e.g. quantum indeterminacy and superposition) averages out.
Truth SeekerFebruary 09, 2025 at 21:09#9668520 likes
Quantum indeterminacy is irrelevant because at macroscopic levels all the quantum weirdness (e.g. quantum indeterminacy and superposition) averages out.
Only sometimes, but not the important times. There are chaotic systems like the weather. One tiny quantum event can (will) cascade into completely different weather in a couple months, (popularly known as the butterfly effect) so the history of the world and human decisions is significantly due to these quantum fluctuations. In other words, given a non-derministic interpretation of quantum mechanics, a person's decision is anything but inevitable from a given prior state. There's a significant list of non-deterministic interpretations. Are you so sure (without evidence) that they're all wrong?
Anyway, it's still pretty irrelevant since that sort of indeterminism doesn't yield free will. Making truly random decisions is not a way to make better decisions, which is why mental processes do not leverage that tool.
The program is not able to generate any other results
Neither are you. Only one choice can be made, free will or not.
Or you didnt explain the distinction you see well enough for my thick skull.
Choice: Having multiple options available and using a natural process to select among them.
Free Choice: Having multiple options available and using a supernatural process to select among them.
It kind of comes down to your beliefs concerning the nature of your process. I have no idea why the latter renders one responsible for the choice made and the former does not. That makes no sense at all to me. It just sounds better. "Hey, the one is called 'free', so I must have it, right? Right??". The other one sounds compelled to me, despite the opposite being the case. The former is the thing in question making its own choices and the latter involves the thing being compelled by a demon that has possessed the entity, overriding what it would have otherwise chosen. That gives the demon free choice, but it takes it away from that which it has possessed.
Reply to frank
I generally agree with most of what flannel jesus says. He knows how to apply physics to philosophical issues.
I think he means that he is essentially parroting the teachings of Schopenhauer in his reply. I wouldn't know, I don't know the teachings of almost any of the well known philosophers. The vast majority of them do not know how to apply physics to philosophical issues, even those that were around during the 20th century when so much changed.
Could anyone have made a different choice in the past than the ones they made?
I see people talking about going back in time and doing things differently. I assumed your question, to phrase it in the present, is: Given multiple options that are, in the physical sense, equally possible (for example, I am equally able to press the Netflix or Disney buttons on my remote, and I am equally able to buy the chocolate or caramel ice creams), is it possible that I might choose either? Or is only one possible, due to the hideously complex interactions of particles and structures taking place within my brain, which is really all anything amounts to, regardless of words like consciousness, perception, and memory, and which can and will work out to only one possible resolution?
I say the former. Either because that is the correct answer, or the hideously complex interactions of particles and structures taking place within my brain, which is really all anything amounts to, regardless of words like consciousness, perception, and memory, can and do work out to only that one possible resolution, every time I consider the question.
Pierre-NormandFebruary 10, 2025 at 06:10#9669810 likes
I say the former. Either because that is the correct answer, or the hideously complex interactions of particles and structures taking place within my brain, which is really all anything amounts to, regardless of words like consciousness, perception, and memory, can and do work out to only that one possible resolution, every time I consider the question.
The two alternative that you are considering, one that seems to leave open alternative opportunities for choice, and the other one that portrays those choices as being pre-determined by antecedent conditions and neural events, seem not to be alternatives at all. They seem to be two compatible viewpoints, or stances, on the same decision point.
The first one is an agential stance taken by the agent themselves who are contemplating some range of opportunities.
The second one is the stance of an external observer who is singularly well informed about microscopic details of the situation but who isn't concerned with evaluating the range of opportunities for actions in terms of desirability of practical rationality.
From this spectatorial stance, it may look like only one option was predetermined but no explanation as to why it is an action of that particular kind that had to take place is in view. From the agential perspective, the sort of action that took place is intelligible in light of the agent's aims, beliefs and reasons. From this stance, the specific path that was chosen among a range of open paths was chosen by the agent, and not by external pressures and/or "internal" (i.e. neural) circumstances. The latter sorts of factors are better seen as impediments, to and/or enabling conditions of, the agent's ability to make rational decisions.
The answer depends on whether or not the Universe is comprehensively and rigidly deterministic . Current scientific understanding says it is not. But then the question is whether (assuming that our current understanding is correct) randomness on the quantum level produces a fully deterministic macro world.
I don't know the answer to that, and I doubt whether the question is even decidable in principle, because regardless of whether the macroworld is subject to randomness to a sufficient degree to make randomness operative at the macro level, knowing the answer would seem to depend on us experiencing a counterfactual reality, which is impossible in principle since anything we experience cannot rightly be thought to be a counterfactual.
Genes, environments, nutrients and experiences are variables which determine and constrain our choices. They are real and their effects on our choices are real.
They could be thought of the qualities of your being. They are not direct effects and causes for your choices. Extending the effects and causes to your general qualities of being is committing the fallacy of relevance.
flannel jesusFebruary 10, 2025 at 10:16#9669990 likes
The answer depends on whether or not the Universe is comprehensively and rigidly deterministic . Current scientific understanding says it is not.
I think an interesting question is, where does quantum randomness come from? There are a few interesting options, but one option in particular I personally really struggle with.
With many worlds, the randomness is actually only apparent randomness, an inevitable subjective experience but not random at all from a meta perspective.
Pilot Wave theory says there's no randomness, the conditions are there which determine any quantum result (maybe retrocausally).
Random-collapse says neither of the above are the right way to conceptualise the randomness, but in this way there are still two possibilities:
1. Non-local causal reason for why this random result was observed instead of that other random possibility. Imagine a universal random number generator that can affect quantum particles non locally.
2. Genuinely no reason at all. Literally no reason whatsoever why one random thing was observed instead of another. True ontological randomness.
I can't really wrap my head around 2. A lot of people go for #2 but, to me, literally any other possibility seems more comprehensible.
Obviously the universe just does what it does, with no concern for what I find comprehensible, so I could easily be wrong. If #2 is reality then I just don't comprehend reality. But damn, I really don't think it's #2. I'm with Einstein: things don't happen for no reason.
Reply to Truth Seeker
When it comes to a situation, you are either sure or unsure. This is a valid dichotomy. You do what you want to do if you are sure. But what about when you are unsure? I think we can agree that we all experience a sense of uncertainty in a situation, as in the maze example. That is when we say we are unsure in a situation. The important question is how could we possibly be uncertain if matter is a deterministic thing. In other words, how the sense of uncertainty is created in the brain considering that the brain is made of matter. This is something that I am currently thinking about and I believe no one has a clear answer to it.
flannel jesusFebruary 10, 2025 at 13:02#9670110 likes
The important question is how could we possibly be uncertain if matter is a deterministic thing. In other words, how the sense of uncertainty is created in the brain considering that the brain is made of matter. This is something that I am currently thinking about and I believe no one has a clear answer to it.
I don't understand why there's a problem to think about at all. Our brain doesn't have direct access to all the knowledge of the world. Our brains build models of how we think the world is, based on limited information, and sometimes those models aren't actually close to how the world is.
I don't understand why there's a problem to think about at all. Our brain doesn't have direct access to all the knowledge of the world. Our brains build models of how we think the world is, based on limited information, and sometimes those models aren't actually close to how the world is.
How are thoughts created in the brain? What is the source of the information and how the information could be processed in the brain? All we know is that there is motion of matter and change in the electromagnetic field in the brain. Without these, I am sure we can tell that no thought is possible. You have certain thoughts when you are unsure in a situation, for example when you are in a maze though. The question of how we could possibly have a sense of uncertainty when the motion of matter and electromagnetic field are deterministic is then valid.
flannel jesusFebruary 10, 2025 at 14:45#9670270 likes
Reply to MoK There are maps, and there are territories. Our brain is a territory in itself, but it's a territory which contains maps of other territories. Those maps can be wrong. Being wrong is a feature of the map, not the territory. Uncertainty is a feature of the map, not the territory.
There are maps, and there are territories. Our brain is a territory in itself, but it's a territory which contains maps of other territories. Those maps can be wrong. Being wrong is a feature of the map, not the territory. Uncertainty is a feature of the map, not the territory.
What do you mean by map and territory?
flannel jesusFebruary 10, 2025 at 15:46#9670410 likes
Reply to MoK Territory is the shit that exists. Map is a representation of the shit that exists.
Reply to flannel jesus
By territory, I think you mean matter and forces, and by representation, you mean thought. However, that does not answer my question. How could we have a single thought, knowing that all that exists is matter and forces?
Truth SeekerFebruary 10, 2025 at 17:07#9670600 likes
One tiny quantum event can (will) cascade into completely different weather in a couple months, (popularly known as the butterfly effect) so the history of the world and human decisions is significantly due to these quantum fluctuations. In other words, given a non-derministic interpretation of quantum mechanics, a person's decision is anything but inevitable from a given prior state. There's a significant list of non-deterministic interpretations. Are you so sure (without evidence) that they're all wrong?
I don't know enough about it to have an opinion about it. Please tell me more about how quantum events affect the weather. Is there a book you can recommend so I can learn more about this? Thank you.
Truth SeekerFebruary 10, 2025 at 18:44#9670750 likes
They could be thought of the qualities of your being. They are not direct effects and causes for your choices. Extending the effects and causes to your general qualities of being is committing the fallacy of relevance.
My genes preceded me and formed the foundation of my existence and nature. I didn't choose my genes and I don't have direct control over them. The same goes for my early environments, nutrients and experiences. You should read "Determined: The Science of Life Without Free Will" by Professor Robert M. Sapolsky.
Truth SeekerFebruary 10, 2025 at 18:48#9670760 likes
The important question is how could we possibly be uncertain if matter is a deterministic thing.
We are uncertain because we are not all-knowing. Which lottery numbers will be the winning numbers? If we knew that we would always be able to pick the winning numbers for the jackpot.
Truth SeekerFebruary 10, 2025 at 18:49#9670770 likes
There are maps, and there are territories. Our brain is a territory in itself, but it's a territory which contains maps of other territories. Those maps can be wrong. Being wrong is a feature of the map, not the territory. Uncertainty is a feature of the map, not the territory.
I agree.
DifferentiatingEggFebruary 10, 2025 at 18:50#9670780 likes
Could anyone have made a different choice in the past than the ones they made?
Is it not a more fundamental question of should, regardless of could? What must one begin doing now, currently, in the gateway of this moment such that all the "could have beens" were worth suffering through?
Truth SeekerFebruary 10, 2025 at 18:56#9670790 likes
We are uncertain because we are not all-knowing. Which lottery numbers will be the winning numbers? If we knew that we would always be able to pick the winning numbers for the jackpot.
So you agree that we are uncertain on many occasions. If the existence of options is not what causes us to be uncertain then what it is?
flannel jesusFebruary 10, 2025 at 19:39#9670880 likes
Reply to MoK how could we have a single thought period?
My genes preceded me and formed the foundation of my existence and nature. I didn't choose my genes and I don't have direct control over them. The same goes for my early environments, nutrients and experiences.
No one has chosen their genes. But people don't blame their genes for the choices they have made. Free will is your mental state, which has nothing to do with your genes, environments and nutrients.
Making a choice is your mental event based on your reasoning and thinking on the various options. Nothing else is involved in making choices.
Truth SeekerFebruary 10, 2025 at 20:02#9670950 likes
Reply to MoK As I already said in my previous post, we are uncertain because we are not all-knowing. Only an all-knowing being is always certain about everything.
No one has chosen their genes. But people don't blame their genes for the choices they have made. Free will is your mental state, which has little to do with your genes, environments and nutrients.
Making a choice is your mental event based on your reasoning and thinking on the various options. Nothing else is involved in making choices.
Our choices can be voluntary but they are not free from determinants, constraints and consequences. Our reasoning and thinking depend entirely on our genes, environments, nutrients and experiences.
Truth SeekerFebruary 10, 2025 at 20:07#9670980 likes
If the existence of options is not what causes us to be uncertain then what it is?
I did take on board your question and I answered it to the best of my knowledge. If you have a better answer, I am happy to read about it.
flannel jesusFebruary 10, 2025 at 20:13#9670990 likes
Reply to MoK You say "How could we have a single thought, knowing that all that exists is matter and forces?" As if you know of some other way to have a single thought.
From the agential perspective, the sort of action that took place is intelligible in light of the agent's aims, beliefs and reasons.
But if the agent's aims, beliefs and reasons are nothing other than the resolution of an incalculable number of interacting physical events, then it is just physical interactions.
Pierre-NormandFebruary 10, 2025 at 22:53#9671520 likes
But if the agent's aims, beliefs and reasons are nothing other than the resolution of an incalculable number of interacting physical events, then it is just physical interactions.
You can't give the whole credit for you own beliefs, aims and reasons to your physical circumstances since all three of those things are normative. If you find out that it's unreasonable for you to believe something, then you stop believing it. Likewise for your aims. And if someone finds out that a reason why they were doing something was bad, then they stop doing it. Those human rational abilities are fallible so it may happen that one holds unreasonable beliefs or makes unreasonable choices and, sometimes, one's circumstances can excuse those failures. But our physical circumstances never explain why our intentional actions are intelligible or what it is that makes those actions reasonable, when they are. Appealing to principle of evolutionary psychology, for instance, amounts to committing the naturalistic fallacy. And appealing to principles of neuroscience or physics and chemistry for explaining someone's bodily motions just amounts to changing the topic to something else. (See Ruth Garrett Millikan's paper What Is Behavior? A Philosophical Essay on Ethology and Individualism in Psychology, reprinted in White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice).
So, I would claim that the agent's beliefs and reasons are something more than the resolution of an incalculable number of interacting physical events. They may be, in a sense, made up of physical things and physical events (since human beings are made up of those things) but they are made up of such ingredients organized in functional ways. Your physical constituents are organized in such a was as to enable your practical rational abilities to choose actions in light of your good reasons for doing them, and the goodness of those reasons, and their appropriateness to your circumstances, don't reduce to physical laws. Hence, the explanations why those choices were made don't reduce to physical laws either and appeals to your physical circumstances (including brain processes) oftentimes are at best, incomplete and at worst irrelevant.
?MoK You say "How could we have a single thought, knowing that all that exists is matter and forces?" As if you know of some other way to have a single thought.
My interpretation of MoK's sentence is that, if what we call thought is the interaction of matter and forces, then it is not different than the freezing of water, the foam that results from mixing vinegar and baking soda, an avalanche, a supernova, the growth of a tree, the path of the planets around the sun, ChatGPT, and literally everything else that ever happens anywhere.
Reply to flannel jesus Thanks for your interesting reply. I'm not all that familiar with the various interpretations of and theses about the nature of the quantum realm. Asa I understand it they are all compatible with observed results, which makes me wonder how we might assess their various plausibilities.
The other issue is that they all seem to be attempts to understand the observed behavior of the microworld using concepts derived from our experience of the familiar macroworld, and I see little reason to expect that is an entirely coherent endeavor. That said, I understand that we cannot help pursuing it.
I did take on board your question and I answered it to the best of my knowledge. If you have a better answer, I am happy to read about it.
Yes, we are not all-knowing, which is why we are unsure in certain situations. We don't know whether it is better to do something or not. That means we are dealing with options in those situations where we are not sure.
You say "How could we have a single thought, knowing that all that exists is matter and forces?" As if you know of some other way to have a single thought.
Having a thought requires an entity to experience it, what I call the mind. Putting this point aside, we are returning to my former point: How could we have options in our thoughts knowing that our thoughts are the result of the motion of matter and electromagnetic fields where these motions are deterministic? So we have to either exclude the existence of options, which I highly doubt to be possible, or we have to find a proper answer to this question. To be honest, I don't have an answer to the question and I doubt if anyone has an answer for it either so it is an open question.
Truth SeekerFebruary 11, 2025 at 13:55#9673340 likes
That means we are dealing with options in those situations where we are not sure.
Even when we are sure about the outcomes, we are still dealing with options. For example, let's say that I am walking and I notice dog poo on the pavement. I have thought of three options in this situation:
1. Clean up the dog poo.
2. Avoid stepping on the dog poo but not clean it up.
3. Step on the dog poo.
No one is coercing me to do any of the three things so my choice to do any of them is voluntary. However, my choice is not free from determinants, constraints and consequences.
If I choose option 1, it will cost me some time, effort and a plastic bag (if I have a plastic bag with me). Doing this will prevent someone else from stepping on the dog poo.
If I choose option 2, it will save me some time, effort and a plastic bag but there is still the risk of someone else stepping on the dog poo.
If I choose option 3, it will make my shoe dirty and I will have to either clean up my shoe or throw away my shoes or keep wearing shoes with dog poo on them and spread the dog poo from my shoes to the inside of my home.
Which of the three options I select is determined by my genes, my environments from my conception to the present, my nutrients from my conception to the present and my experiences from my conception to the present.
If I had the genes of a banana tree instead of the human genes I have, I would not be sentient and would not even notice the dog poo, never mind think about my options.
If I was in a life-threatening environment e.g. someone was shooting at me with a machine gun, I simply would not give the dog poo much thought. I would be preoccupied with how I can avoid getting shot by taking cover or running erratically.
If was deprived of nutrients as a zygote, I would not even get to be born. I would have died when I was in the womb.
If I experienced an accident which caused me to go blind, I would not have even noticed the dog poo.
I could go on and on and keep listing more and more scenarios but I don't want to spend any more time explaining how we are never free from determinants, constraints and consequences. Have you understood my point? If you haven't understood it, please let me know and I will try to explain further.
flannel jesusFebruary 11, 2025 at 15:29#9673630 likes
What makes you so sure "options" are ontologically real things, and not just a feature of maps rather than a feature of territories?
They are real because I have had doubts in many situations in my life. It could be a feature of maps rather than territories but then we have to deal with the question I raised.
And if options ARE ontologically real things, why couldn't they be physical?
I cannot see how they could be physical accepting that physical entities are deterministic by deterministic I mean that any state of matter only leads to one unique state later. If we accept that options are real in the physical world then it means that one state of matter may lead to one state or another state later and this is against the very definition of determinism.
They are real because I have had doubts in many situations in my life. It could be a feature of maps rather than territories but then we have to deal with the question I raised.
Neural nets - as in, things like Chat GPT - have doubts. They have ways of representing internal confidence levels about their models about the data they're ingesting.
Neural nets are implemented physically, on physical hardware.
I don't see where this assumption that doubts can't exist in a mind that's implemented physically comes from. As far as I can tell, the evidence available suggests that that's incorrect, that physical implementations of world-modeling machines can and do have doubts.
PoeticUniverseFebruary 11, 2025 at 22:02#9674730 likes
I talked about a situation when you are not certain, by this I mean you do not know the consequence of your decision.
We never know all the long-term consequences of our actions. For example, let's say in my previous example, I cleaned up the dog poo from the pavement. I know the immediate consequences of this action but I don't know what effect this action will have on myself and others a week, a month, a year, a decade, a century, a millennia and on and on down the line.
Neural nets - as in, things like Chat GPT - have doubts. They have ways of representing internal confidence levels about their models about the data they're ingesting.
Interesting article. It however does not explain what is the source of doubts.
It however does not explain what is the source of doubts.
no, it shows instead that doubts are a part of an LLM, and we know that LLMs are implemented physically, on physical machinery, undergoing physical processes. It doesn't "explain the source of doubts" because that's not the point of the article, it just gives a very strong example of physically implemented concept of doubts.
Reply to flannel jesus
Cool. So doubts are real and this means that options are real as well. We however don't know the source of doubts.
flannel jesusFebruary 12, 2025 at 11:33#9676640 likes
Reply to MoK But we do know they can be implemented in a physical world-modelling machine, because we've built physical world-modelling machines that have doubts.
We never know all the long-term consequences of our actions.
Truth Seeker
Then options are real if you don't know the consequences of your actions.
Knowing or not knowing the consequences of our actions has nothing to do with options being real or not real. We can make voluntary choices. My point is that our choices are never free from determinants (genes, environments, nutrients and experiences), constraints and consequences.
Reply to Truth Seeker
Doubts are not allowed in a deterministic world. Everything is certain in a deterministic world since by definition determinism refers to a worldview in which each state of matter uniquely defines another state of matter later. So, I ask you this question whether you have ever had a doubt. If yes, then we are dealing with a problem, the problem being how doubt is possible. I don't think that anyone has a clear answer to this. So to me, the mental phenomena are not easy to understand and do not follow the rule of determinism.
Truth SeekerFebruary 13, 2025 at 20:13#9681430 likes
Doubts are not allowed in a deterministic world. Everything is certain in a deterministic world since by definition determinism refers to a worldview in which each state of matter uniquely defines another state of matter later. So, I ask you this question whether you have ever had a doubt. If yes, then we are dealing with a problem, the problem being how doubt is possible. I don't think that anyone has a clear answer to this. So to me, the mental phenomena are not easy to understand and do not follow the rule of determinism.
The statement: "Doubts are not allowed in a deterministic world." is false.
The statement: "Doubts are not allowed in a deterministic world." is false.
It is correct given the definition of doubt.
Truth SeekerFebruary 13, 2025 at 20:18#9681500 likes
Reply to MoK Let me give you an example to help you understand. The selection of lottery numbers is entirely deterministic. I doubt I can predict them with 100% accuracy every time. My inability to predict which lottery numbers will be drawn at each draw has to do with my lack of omniscience and the large number of possibilities.
Let me give you an example to help you understand. The selection of lottery numbers is entirely deterministic. I doubt I can predict them with 100% accuracy every time. My inability to predict which lottery numbers will be drawn at each draw has to do with my lack of omniscience and the large number of possibilities.
I am talking about mental state doubt.
Truth SeekerFebruary 14, 2025 at 13:54#9684040 likes
The mental state of experiencing doubt is not something special that sets it apart from other mental states. We experience many sensory perceptions, thoughts and emotions. They are all produced by our brain activities. Our brain activities are determined by our genes, environments, nutrients and experiences.
We experience many sensory perceptions, thoughts and emotions. They are all produced by our brain activities.
Yes, brain states are subject to change and are deterministic. The question is how doubt can arise from the brain, considering that it is a deterministic object.
Truth SeekerFebruary 14, 2025 at 15:27#9684670 likes
The mental state of experiencing doubt is not something special that sets it apart from other mental states.
Truth Seeker
It is special. If we accept the mental phenomenon of doubt, we can conclude that options are real.
We experience many sensory perceptions, thoughts and emotions. They are all produced by our brain activities.
Truth Seeker
Yes, brain states are subject to change and are deterministic. The question is how doubt can arise from the brain, considering that it is a deterministic object.
No, doubting is not special. You clearly don't understand how the brain works. Please read "Being You: A New Science of Consciousness" by Anil Seth and "Determined: Life Without Free Will" by Robert M. Sapolsky. If you have any questions while reading these books, please ask here and I will do my best to answer them.
You clearly don't understand how the brain works. Please read "Being You: A New Science of Consciousness" by Anil Seth and "Determined: Life Without Free Will" by Robert M. Sapolsky. If you have any questions while reading these books, please ask here and I will do my best to answer them.
I have been working and reading on the philosophy of the mind for several years. Well, it seems to me that is an end to the discussion.
Truth SeekerFebruary 14, 2025 at 15:54#9684880 likes
Reply to MoK No, doubt is not special. Just because you claim it to be special does not make it so. Have you read the two books I recommended?
No, doubt is not special. Just because you claim it to be special does not make it so. Have you read the two books I recommended?
I know enough about the philosophy of the mind and I don't need to read another book on the topic.
Truth SeekerFebruary 14, 2025 at 15:59#9684910 likes
Reply to MoK You want to remain ignorant instead of learning something new. How fascinating! I am not blaming you or crediting you. If I or another organism had your genes, environments, nutrients and experiences, I or another organism would have the same thoughts as you because we would be identical to you. No one deserves any blame or credit for anything.
You want to remain ignorant instead of learning something new. How fascinating! I am not blaming you or crediting you. If I or another organism had your genes, environments, nutrients and experiences, I or another organism would have the same thoughts as you because we would be identical to you.
I am not ignorant of the topic. I have no time to read a book that denies the reality of free will. Philosophers of mind still struggle with the Hard Problem of consciousness. I am wondering how then could address free will when they are unsure what consciousness is!
Truth SeekerFebruary 14, 2025 at 16:12#9685010 likes
You want to remain ignorant instead of learning something new. How fascinating! I am not blaming you or crediting you. If I or another organism had your genes, environments, nutrients and experiences, I or another organism would have the same thoughts as you because we would be identical to you.
Truth Seeker
I am not ignorant of the topic. I have no time to read a book that denies the reality of free will. Philosophers of mind still struggle with the Hard Problem of consciousness. I am wondering how then could address free will when they are unsure what consciousness is!
I am not a philosopher. I am a scientist. We make voluntary choices but our choices are never free from determinants, constraints and consequences. The so-called Hard Problem of Consciousness is not actually all that hard. It's a philosophical construct, nothing more. You could claim that I am a Philosophical Zombie. It would be impossible for me to prove to you that I am a conscious being. Just because it is impossible to prove to others that I am conscious, it does not mean I am a Philosophical Zombie. Philosophical Zombie is yet another philosophical construct, nothing more.
I am not a philosopher. I am a scientist. We make voluntary choices but our choices are never free from determinants, constraints and consequences. The so-called Hard Problem of Consciousness is not actually all that hard. It's a philosophical construct, nothing more. You could claim that I am a Philosophical Zombie. It would be impossible for me to prove to you that I am a conscious being. Just because it is impossible to prove to others that I am conscious, it does not mean I am a Philosophical Zombie. Philosophical Zombie is yet another philosophical construct, nothing more.
Let's say that we disagree and put an end to this discussion. Thanks for your time.
Truth SeekerFebruary 14, 2025 at 16:19#9685060 likes
Reply to MoK As you wish. Thank you for your time and posts.
RelativistSeptember 26, 2025 at 01:52#10151150 likes
Could anyone have made a different choice in the past than the ones they made?
There is no objective basis for anyone to say, "yes" - even if it is true that we could have.
Consider why it seems like we could have: it's entirely in retrospect. But we're reevaluating it from our now-current mindset - not the mindset at the time of the choice.
Mindset includes one's emotional state, physical state, state of knowledge, immediate surroundings, most recent experiences. and the sequence of thoughts that led to the choice. Given all that, could we really have chosen differently? Maybe, but it is impossible to know. Hindsight doesn't establish it. We can't recreate the mindset.
AmadeusDSeptember 26, 2025 at 02:04#10151210 likes
Technically, no, because the choice was made and we're not able to ever review it in this way.
Theoretically, I think yes. But this involves agreeing that something billions of years ago would have to have happened differently.
Truth SeekerSeptember 26, 2025 at 10:40#10152070 likes
Reply to RelativistReply to AmadeusD If hard determinism is true, then all choices are inevitable, which means that no one could have chosen differently. It's impossible to know with 100% certainty whether it is true or false.
RelativistSeptember 26, 2025 at 14:20#10152260 likes
Reply to Truth Seeker A lot of religious people infer there is libertarian free will to account for being held accountable for their choices. So they aren't really inferring free will on an objective basis. Rather, it's entailed by faith.
Truth SeekerSeptember 27, 2025 at 11:19#10153150 likes
Reply to Relativist I agree. Faith is not reliable. Religions are self-contradictory, mutually contradictory, and they contradict what we know using the scientific method.
Are we free agents or are our choices determined by variables such as genes, environments, nutrients, and experiences?
I think both, but I'm not a compatibilist. To my horror, I'm probably going to sound a bit like @apokrisis. We are determined by things we give a shit about, and our giving-a-shits constrain our choices. But within those constraints we are free to arbitrarily choose between alternatives we don't give a shit about.
hypericinSeptember 28, 2025 at 00:26#10154050 likes
I have no doubt I could have made different choices on innumerable occasions. There has never been a time in my life when my actions have been so constrained that I could only do one thing. I act according to what I know of my desires, what I know of the world, my emotions, and my reasoning. All these muddle together in my poor, strained brain, and out pops a decision, for better or worse. By chance, I could have made other decisions such that I would be a multi millionaire now, married with children, homeless, imprisoned, or dead.
But, what of it? That things might have been different does not imply the strong notion of "free will" that I suspect is incoherent.
PatternerSeptember 28, 2025 at 03:59#10154250 likes
Consider why it [I]seems[/I] like we could have: it's entirely in retrospect.
Not for me. I feel many choices as I'm making them. I struggle with them, looking for a reason too give one option a leg up. Yesterday, I had two scoops of salted caramel ice cream, and one chocolate. (Plus toppings, and a brookie at the bottom.) It took some time to decide. I find the notion that I am an automoton, unable to do more than act out the resolution of all the bioelectric signals jumping around in my brain, and the specifics of (in this example) [I]how[/I] I go about eating my dessert determined in the same way, to be preposterous.
There are many times that what [I]seemed[/I] to be the case was wrong. But we know they are wrong because it was demonstrated in one way or another. The default position isn't that anything that seems to be the case is not, and we don't need its falsehood demonstrated.
That things might have been different does not imply the strong notion of "free will" that I suspect is incoherent.
But I come at this from the opposite direction, it is the constraints of the hard physical world which restrict my strong free will. Take that away and I would have near absolute freedom.
RelativistSeptember 28, 2025 at 15:05#10154670 likes
Not for me. I feel many choices as I'm making them. I struggle with them, looking for a reason too give one option a leg up.
Fair point, the choice-making process also gives us reason to believe we could have chosen differently. The choice was ours, not something imposed upon us.
But still, there were pre-existing predilections - flavors you know you like. There was a series of sights, sounds, and smells; a series of thoughts. The choice was a direct consequence. Something would need to have been different for a different choice to have been made.
. I find the notion that I am an automoton, unable to do more than act out the resolution of all the bioelectric signals jumping around in my brain, and the specifics of (in this example) how I go about eating my dessert determined in the same way, to be preposterous.
Why? Isn't it just because you know the choices were yours to make, that you went through the process and you are solely responsible for the choices?
Even though it seems like you could have chosen differently, it is impossible to know you could have.
Truth SeekerSeptember 28, 2025 at 18:48#10155000 likes
PatternerSeptember 29, 2025 at 19:39#10156310 likes
Reply to RelativistYou're right, of course, that it's not provable either way. The thing is, there's no reason for me to feel anything about my decisions if they are all nothing more than the resolution of interacting/competing/conflicting bioelectric (autocorrect said "buttercream" the first time :rofl:) currents running around the brain. More complex than those damned art things where's you turn it upside down and watch it all settle at the bottom, but just as physical. Why do automotons feel things about something they have no control over? How can we even make a choice we regret if it was the natural resolution of the brain impulses? Why would evolution have selected for us caring about it if it's going to happen the only way it can?
RelativistSeptember 29, 2025 at 20:47#10156380 likes
if they are all nothing more than the resolution of interacting/competing/conflicting bioelectric (autocorrect said "buttercream" the first time :rofl:) currents running around the brain.
Assume the mind is not equivalent to the brain. Could you have chosen differently? You still had a set of background beliefs, a set of conditioned responses, a particular emotional state and physical state, were subject to a particular set of stimuli in your immediate environment, and you had a particular series of thoughts that concluded with the specific ice cream order that you made. Given this full context, how could you have made a different choice? You'd have to introduce randomnness. Randomness entails a factor not under our control.
Truth SeekerSeptember 29, 2025 at 21:43#10156570 likes
Randomness entails a factor not under our control.
It's not just randomness that is a factor not under our control. We don't control the genes we inherit, our early environments, our early nutrients and our early experiences. As we grow older, we acquire some control over our environments, nutrients and experiences, but even then, we don't have 100% control.
Given this full context, how could you have made a different choice?
Reply to Relativist How? Because you're ignoring another major factor in Human Decision Making, namely randomness. That is, while commonly recalled (important) decisions are made totally or mostly on logical grounds, most minor to miniscule decisions aren't made after exhaustive consideration, since they're trivial or below. Which urinal do you choose at the airport? Could you have cjosen a different one under identical circumstances? I think: yes. The bigger question is: does it matter?
RelativistSeptember 30, 2025 at 00:02#10156710 likes
Reply to LuckyR I didn't ignore randomness. I pointed out that (true) randomness is something outside our control. So it could account for a different outcome, but it's not a different outcome due to an act of will- it doesn't entail libertarian free will.
But is there actually true randomness involved? This would be impossible to establish. I mentioned the role of physical and emotional state, conditioned responses, and of subtle factors in the environment. These could constitute subconscious factors that determine the decision. It's impossible to know. .
Reply to Relativist It's not either/or. It's a percentage thing. Of course there's randomness involved, but in most important situations it's a tiny percentage of the process (thus why human behavior can be predicted better than chance, yet nowhere near 100& of the time). The lower one's perception of the importance of the decision to be made, the lower one's mental/logical input into the decision making process. Randomness takes up that slack. Think about it, how much effort do you put into decisions that you believe don't matter. Me? Not much.
Truth SeekerOctober 09, 2025 at 21:25#10174060 likes
Quantum indeterminacy is irrelevant because at macroscopic levels all the quantum weirdness (e.g. quantum indeterminacy and superposition) averages out.
Truth Seeker
Only sometimes, but not the important times. There are chaotic systems like the weather. One tiny quantum event can (will) cascade into completely different weather in a couple months, (popularly known as the butterfly effect) so the history of the world and human decisions is significantly due to these quantum fluctuations. In other words, given a non-derministic interpretation of quantum mechanics, a person's decision is anything but inevitable from a given prior state. There's a significant list of non-deterministic interpretations. Are you so sure (without evidence) that they're all wrong?
Anyway, it's still pretty irrelevant since that sort of indeterminism doesn't yield free will. Making truly random decisions is not a way to make better decisions, which is why mental processes do not leverage that tool.
Thank you for the thoughtful response. You raise a key point that in chaotic systems, even minute quantum fluctuations could, in theory, scale up to macroscopic differences (the quantum butterfly effect). However, I think this doesnt meaningfully undermine determinism for the following reasons:
1. Determinism vs. Predictability:
Determinism doesnt require predictability. A system can be deterministic and yet practically unpredictable due to sensitivity to initial conditions. Chaos theory actually presupposes determinism - small differences in starting conditions lead to vastly different outcomes because the system follows deterministic laws. If the system were non-deterministic, the equations of chaos wouldnt even apply.
2. Quantum Amplification Is Not Evidence of Freedom:
As you already noted, even if quantum indeterminacy occasionally affects macroscopic events, randomness is not freedom. A decision influenced by quantum noise is not a free decision its just probabilistic. It replaces deterministic necessity with stochastic chance. That doesnt rescue libertarian free will; it only introduces randomness into causation.
3. Quantum Interpretations and Evidence:
Youre right that there are non-deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics - such as Copenhagen, GRW, or QBism - but there are also deterministic ones: de Broglie-Bohm (pilot-wave), Many-Worlds, and superdeterministic models. None of them are empirically distinguishable so far. Until we have direct evidence for objective indeterminacy, determinism remains a coherent and arguably simpler hypothesis (per Occams razor).
4. Macroscopic Decoherence:
Decoherence ensures that quantum superpositions in the brain or weather systems effectively collapse into stable classical states extremely quickly. Whatever quantum noise exists gets averaged out before it can influence neural computation in any meaningful way - except in speculative scenarios, which remain unproven.
So, while I agree that quantum indeterminacy might introduce genuine randomness into physical systems, I dont see how that transforms causality into freedom or invalidates the deterministic model of the universe as a whole. At best, it replaces determinism with a mix of determinism + randomness - neither of which grants us metaphysical free will.
I don't know enough about it to have an opinion about it. Please tell me more about how quantum events affect the weather. Is there a book you can recommend so I can learn more about this? Thank you.
Apologies for not seeing that question for months.
There are whole books, yes. A nice (but still pop) article is this one:
https://www.space.com/chaos-theory-explainer-unpredictable-systems.html
The wiki version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect
The latter link in places talks specifically about the small initial differences being different quantum outcomes. The best known quantum amplifier is Schrodinger's cat, where a single quantum event quickly determines the fate of the cat, even if it isn't hidden in a box.
1. Determinism vs. Predictability:
Determinism doesnt require predictability. A system can be deterministic and yet practically unpredictable due to sensitivity to initial conditions.
Even classical mechanics has been shown to be nondeterministic. Norton's dome is a great example of an effect without a cause. Nevertheless, a deterministic interpretation of physics would probably require hidden variables that determine the effect that appears uncaused.
Chaos theory actually presupposes determinism - small differences in starting conditions lead to vastly different outcomes because the system follows deterministic laws.
But it doesn't require determinism. Chaos theory applies just as well to nondeterministic interpretations of physics.
If the system were non-deterministic, the equations of chaos wouldnt even apply.
Well, deterministic equations would not apply. How about Schrodinger's equation? That function is very chaotic, and it is deterministic only under interpretations. like MWI.
2. Quantum Amplification Is Not Evidence of Freedom:
As you already noted, even if quantum indeterminacy occasionally affects macroscopic events, randomness is not freedom. A decision influenced by quantum noise is not a free decision its just probabilistic. It replaces deterministic necessity with stochastic chance. That doesnt rescue libertarian free will; it only introduces randomness into causation.
Agree. So very few seem to realize this.
To me, freedom is making your own choices and not having something else do it for you. Determinism is a great tool for this, which is why almost all decision making devices utilize as much as possible deterministic mechanisms such as binary logic.
3. Quantum Interpretations and Evidence:
Youre right that there are non-deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics - such as Copenhagen, GRW, or QBism - but there are also deterministic ones: de Broglie-Bohm (pilot-wave), Many-Worlds, and superdeterministic models.
Superdeterminism is not listed as a valid interpretation of QM since it invalidates pretty much all empirical evidence. It's a bit like BiV view in that manner. The view doesn't allow one to trust any evidence.
MWI is a good example of chaotic behavior. You have all these worlds, and since weather and which creatures evolve are all chaotic functions, most of those worlds don't have you in it, or even humans. Most of those worlds don't have Earth in it. The deterministic part only says that all these possibilities must exist. There's no chance to any of them. But do they exist equally? That's a weird question to ponder.
No, I don't buy into MWI since I feel it gets some critical things wrong.
None of them are empirically distinguishable so far. Until we have direct evidence for objective indeterminacy, determinism remains a coherent and arguably simpler hypothesis (per Occams razor).
Of the two deterministic interpretations you mention, MWI is arguably the simplest, and DBB is probably the most complicated. This illustrates that 'deterministic' is not necessarily 'simpler'.
4. Macroscopic Decoherence:
Decoherence ensures that quantum superpositions in the brain or weather systems effectively collapse into stable classical states extremely quickly.
At least under interpretations that support collapse.
Whatever quantum noise exists gets averaged out before it can influence neural computation in any meaningful way
Yes, that what I meant by 'utilize as much as possible deterministic mechanisms'.
except in speculative scenarios, which remain unproven.
In particular, no biological quantum amplifier has been found, and such a mechanism would very much have quickly evolved if there was any useful information in that quantum noise.
Bottom line is that we pretty much agree with each other.
Truth SeekerOctober 10, 2025 at 09:56#10175060 likes
Reply to noAxioms Thank you very much for the fascinating links you posted. I really appreciate your thoughtful follow-up. I agree that were largely converging on the same view.
Regarding Nortons dome, I think its an interesting mathematical curiosity rather than a physically realistic case of indeterminism. It depends on idealized assumptions (e.g., perfectly frictionless surface, infinite precision in initial conditions) that dont occur in nature. Still, its a useful illustration that even Newtonian mechanics can be formulated to allow indeterminate solutions under certain boundary conditions.
As for the quantumchaos connection, yes - Schrödingers cat is indeed the archetypal quantum amplifier, though its an artificial setup. In natural systems like weather, decoherence tends to suppress quantum-level randomness before it can scale up meaningfully. Lorenzs butterfly effect remains classical chaos: deterministic, yet unpredictable in practice because initial conditions can never be measured with infinite precision. Whether a microscopic quantum fluctuation could actually alter a macroscopic weather pattern remains an open question - interesting but speculative.
I agree with you that determinism is a great tool for agency. Even if all our choices are determined, they are still our choices - the outputs of our own brains, reasoning, and values. Indeterminacy doesnt enhance freedom; it merely adds noise.
On superdeterminism: I share your concern. Its unfalsifiable if taken literally (since it could explain away any experimental result), but it remains conceptually valuable in exploring whether quantum correlations might arise from deeper causal connections. I dont endorse it, but I dont dismiss it either until we have decisive evidence.
You put it well: the bottom line is that we mostly agree - especially that neither pure determinism nor indeterminism rescues libertarian free will. What matters is understanding the causal web as fully as possible.
Thanks again for such a stimulating exchange. Discussions like this remind me how philosophy and physics intersect in fascinating ways.
Technically, no, because the choice was made and we're not able to ever review it in this way.
Being able to review it amounts to different initial conditions.
Theoretically, I think yes. But this involves agreeing that something billions of years ago would have to have happened differently.
Billions of years?? It would be interesting, in say MWI, so see how long it take for two worlds split from the same initial conditions to result in a different decision being made. It can be one second, but probably minutes. Maybe even days for a big decision like 'should I propose marriage to this girl?'. But billions of years? No. Your very existence, let along some decision you make, is due to quantum events at most a short time before your conception.
If hard determinism is true, then all choices are inevitable
Any determinism. That is also true under what is called soft determinism.
But as you've posted, determinism has little if anything to do with free will, or with moral responsibility. Substance dualism is a weird wrench in this debate. If there are two things, only the one in control is responsible for the actions of the body. So say if I get possessed by a demon (rabies say) and bite somebody, infecting them, am I responsible for that or is the demon? Is it fair to convict a rabid human of assault if they bite somebody? Kind of a moot point since they're going to die shortly anyway.
Assume the mind is not equivalent to the brain. Could you have chosen differently? You still had a set of background beliefs, a set of conditioned responses, a particular emotional state and physical state, were subject to a particular set of stimuli in your immediate environment, and you had a particular series of thoughts that concluded with the specific ice cream order that you made. Given this full context, how could you have made a different choice?
Yes. This is why determinism is irrelevant to the free will debate.
If a supernatural entity is making your choices, then not only is determinism false, but all of natural physics is false. A whole new theory is needed, and there currently isn't one proposed.
As has been pointed out, natural physics is regularly updated, and thus the current consensus view is not 'the truth'. But despite all the updates and new discoveries, one thing stands: Physics operates under a set of rules. We're still discovering those rules, but some definitions of moral responsibility require the lack of any rules. That's not ever going to be found to be the case.
Because you're ignoring another major factor in Human Decision Making, namely randomness.
I pretty much deny this. All evolved decision making structures have seemed to favor deterministic primitives (such as logic gates), with no randomness, which Truth Seeker above correctly classifies as noise, something to be filtered out, not to be leveraged.
Sure, unpredictable is sometimes an advantage. Witness the erratic flight path of a moth, making it harder to catch in flight. But it uses deterministic mechanisms to achieve that unpredictability, not leveraging random processes.
Regarding Nortons dome, I think its an interesting mathematical curiosity rather than a physically realistic case of indeterminism.
Classical physics is a mathematical model, which some have proposed is reversible. No physics is violated by watching the pool balls move back into the triangle with all the energy/momentum transferred to the cue ball stopped by the cue.
Norton's dome demonstrates that classical mathematics is actually not reversible, nor is it deterministic, the way that the equations seem to be at first glance.
As for the quantumchaos connection, yes
...
In natural systems like weather, decoherence tends to suppress quantum-level randomness before it can scale up meaningfully.
You have a reference for this assertion, because I don't buy it at all. Most quantum randomness gets averaged out, sure, but each causes a completely different state of a given system, even if it's only a different location and velocity of each and every liquid molecule.
Evolution depends on quantum randomness, without which mutations would rarely occur and progress would proceed at a snails pace. There's a fine balance to be had there. Too much quantum radiation and DNA gets destroyed before it can be filtered for fitness. Too little and there's no diversity to evolve something better.
Truth SeekerOctober 10, 2025 at 15:32#10175630 likes
Reply to noAxioms Thank you for asking for a source. Youre right that quantum effects can, in principle, influence macroscopic systems, but the consensus in physics is that quantum coherence decays extremely rapidly in warm, complex environments like the atmosphere, which prevents quantum indeterminacy from meaningfully propagating to the classical scale except through special, engineered amplifiers (like photomultipliers or Geiger counters).
Here are some references that support this:
1. Wojciech Zurek (2003). Decoherence, einselection, and the quantum origins of the classical. Reviews of Modern Physics, 75, 715775.
Zurek explains that decoherence times for macroscopic systems at room temperature are extraordinarily short (on the order of (10^-20) seconds), meaning superpositions collapse into classical mixtures almost instantly. DOI: 10.1103/RevModPhys.75.715
2. Joos & Zeh (1985). The emergence of classical properties through interaction with the environment. Zeitschrift für Physik B Condensed Matter, 59, 223243.
They calculate that even a dust grain in air decoheres in about (10^-31) seconds due to collisions with air molecules and photons - long before any macroscopic process could amplify quantum noise.
3. Max Tegmark (2000). Importance of quantum decoherence in brain processes. Physical Review E, 61, 41944206.
Tegmark estimated decoherence times in the brain at (10^-13) to (10^-20) seconds, concluding that biological systems are effectively classical. The same reasoning applies (even more strongly) to meteorological systems, where temperature and particle interactions are vastly higher.
In short, quantum coherence does not persist long enough in atmospheric systems to influence large-scale weather patterns. While every individual molecular collision is, in a sense, quantum, the statistical ensemble of billions of interactions behaves deterministically according to classical thermodynamics. Thats why classical models like NavierStokes work so well for weather prediction (up to chaotic limits of measurement precision), without needing to invoke quantum probability.
That said, I fully agree with you that quantum randomness is crucial to mutation-level processes in biology - those occur in small, shielded molecular systems, where quantum tunnelling or base-pairing transitions can indeed introduce randomness before decoherence sets in. The key distinction is scale and isolation: quantum effects matter in micro-environments, but decoherence washes them out in large, warm, chaotic systems like the atmosphere.
Here are two images I created to help explain my worldview:
That can be answered with yes or no, depending on how you look at it.
What's your answer?
I answered yes, but that is conditional on having better information. Your question is tied to notions of good and evil and the tendency to judge people as good or evil. I do not believe we are good or evil, but we do the best we can with what we know, and our conscience and feelings of regret need good information so we can avoid those regrets.
Notice the word "conscience" meanings coming out of knowledge.
CopernicusOctober 12, 2025 at 15:43#10181310 likes
I pretty much deny this. All evolved decision making structures have seemed to favor deterministic primitives (such as logic gates), with no randomness, which Truth Seeker above correctly classifies as noise, something to be filtered out, not to be leveraged.
Sure, unpredictable is sometimes an advantage. Witness the erratic flight path of a moth, making it harder to catch in flight. But it uses deterministic mechanisms to achieve that unpredictability, not leveraging random processes.
Exactly. I said you were "ignoring" randomness, your wording is "denying". Same thing. Just so you know, randomness exists, human denials notwithstanding.
ProtagoranSocratistOctober 12, 2025 at 22:49#10182230 likes
since "the past" is a done deal, then i have to answer no. Is this some sort of survey in relation to free will and determinism? "Free Will vs. Determinism" is one of my favorite philosophy conundrums, but it doesn't have a clear answer.
If you need me to elaborate, does wishing you made a different choice effect the past choices you made? If it doesn't, then the answer to the thread question and survey has to be a no. Argue with me all you like, but regret is an extremely common conundrum for humans and i'm rather experienced.
I guess "yes" is the right answer if there are alternate dimensions where people made different choices, but i don't know about those, so i can't answer yes.
Metaphysician UndercoverOctober 13, 2025 at 00:51#10182500 likes
since "the past" is a done deal, then i have to answer no. Is this some sort of survey in relation to free will and determinism? "Free Will vs. Determinism" is one of my favorite philosophy conundrums, but it doesn't have a clear answer.
The question is not whether someone can change a choice which is already made, but whether one could have, at that time, the time when the choice was made, chose something different.
ProtagoranSocratistOctober 13, 2025 at 01:03#10182520 likes
The question is not whether someone can change a choice which is already made, but whether one could have, at that time, the time when the choice was made, chose something different.
We are talking about choices that could have only been made one time.
L'éléphantOctober 13, 2025 at 01:13#10182550 likes
Unless the universe (of determinant forces and constraints on one) changes too, I don't think so.
And if we only had one choice at the time, then yes, the answer is no. But I have no idea why determinism works here. I actually do not understand the relationship between determinism and the choices we make. The choices we make in our daily life are nothing compared to what determinism has in store for us.
Here are my examples:
1. We do not have a choice but to be a moral agent (not to say we will be moral, just that we either be moral or immoral).
2. We do not have a choice as to thoughts. We will have thoughts and imaginations. That's determined given our constitution.
4. Perception is determined, unless you're born a lump of flesh. We will perceive, period.
5. Desires are determined -- you can have difference desires, but you will have desires absolutely.
Metaphysician UndercoverOctober 13, 2025 at 01:20#10182560 likes
We are talking about choices that could have only been made one time.
What do you mean by "one time"? Do you deny that a person can deliberate, procrastinate, or otherwise delay in decision making, such that the choice occurs over a period of time?
Youre right that quantum effects can, in principle, influence macroscopic systems, but the consensus in physics is that quantum coherence decays extremely rapidly in warm, complex environments like the atmosphere, which prevents quantum indeterminacy from meaningfully propagating to the classical scale except through special, engineered amplifiers (like photomultipliers or Geiger counters).
OK, very much yes on the rapid decay of coherence. But this does not in any way prevent changes from propagating to the larger scales in any chaotic system (such as the atmosphere). Sure, a brick wall is going to stand for decades without quantum interactions having any meaningful effect, but a wall is not a particulrly chaotic system.
Here are some references that support this:
1. Wojciech Zurek (2003). Decoherence, einselection, and the quantum origins of the classical.
Zurek explains that decoherence times for macroscopic systems at room temperature are extraordinarily short (on the order of (10^-20) seconds), meaning superpositions collapse into classical mixtures almost instantly.
2. Joos & Zeh (1985). The emergence of classical properties through interaction with the environment.
They calculate that even a dust grain in air decoheres in about (10^-31) seconds due to collisions with air molecules and photons - long before any macroscopic process could amplify quantum noise.
3. Max Tegmark (2000). Importance of quantum decoherence in brain processes.
Tegmark estimated decoherence times in the brain at (10^-13) to (10^-20) seconds, concluding that biological systems are effectively classical. The same reasoning applies (even more strongly) to meteorological systems, where temperature and particle interactions are vastly higher.
All three supporting only the first part I agreed with, yes. None of them support quantum differences propagating into macroscopic differences.
The question you need to ask is this: Given say MWI where you have all these different worlds splitting due to quantum events, how long does it take for classical differences to appear.
For the weather, this can take months.to be unrecognizably different. For a brick wall, probably decades. For a meteor hitting or missing Earth, probably millennia. For a human to choose one thing instead of another, maybe 10 minutes (a guess), and that depend on the gravity of the choice being made.
For the conception of a human, perhaps under a minute.
MWI is illustrative, but in any interpretation, specific quantum effects take about this long to cause or prevent these various macroscopic events.
In short, quantum coherence does not persist long enough ...
Coherence is not in any way required for quantum events to have an effect. Quite the opposite. Absent a measurement (collapse?) of some sort, quantum events can have no effect..
in atmospheric systems to influence large-scale weather patterns. While every individual molecular collision is, in a sense, quantum, the statistical ensemble of billions of interactions behaves deterministically according to classical thermodynamics.
Yes, but classical thermodynamics is a very chaotic system. Any difference, no matter how tiny, amplify into massive differences.
I agree that quantum improbability cannot be worked into weather prediction since there is no way to predict it, and weather prediction is done at significantly larger granularity, hardly a simulation at the atomic level. Hence it is good for a week or two at best. After that, you consult the farmer's almanac.
It is illuminating to track the weather prediction for a given day. It appears on my site 10 days hence. So save that prediction each day until the day in question arises. See how much the prediction changes as the day grows nearer. Sometimes it is fairly stable, but often it's all over the map, meaning they're practically guessing.
Exactly. I said you were "ignoring" randomness, your wording is "denying". Same thing. Just so you know, randomness exists, human denials notwithstanding.
Sure, it exists, but decision making structures (both machine and biological) are designed to filter out the randomness out and leverage only deterministic processes. I mean, neither transistors nor neurons would function at all without quantum effects like tunneling, but both are designed to produce a repeatable classical effect, not a random one.
ProtagoranSocratistOctober 13, 2025 at 05:01#10182760 likes
Do you deny that a person can deliberate, procrastinate, or otherwise delay in decision making, such that the choice occurs over a period of time?
No i never said that, what i'm trying to say is this:
"Could anyone have made a different choice in the past than the ones they made?"
It's fine and perfectly reasonable to say to yourself "i could have done _____ differently, for _____ reasons", but the phrasing of the question is "could anyone have made a different choice". We tell ourselves we should/could have made different choices as a narrative that will help us make different choices in the future, but the truth is the choice we made was already made.
There's an ancient phrase that "you can't step into the same river twice", and if you believe the validity of the phrase, then you will answer no to the question, but otherwise, you will answer yes. For me to answer "yes", it would imply that the "anyone" had different knowledge or at least knew they were about to do something wrong or imperfectly.
such that the choice occurs over a period of time?
I had no idea a single choice could occur over a period of time. Could you elaborate on that? For example, what's the grey area between doing and not doing?
This is honestly one of the interesting things about "talking" on open internet forums: it always seems like a mistake because it's so open ended.
Metaphysician UndercoverOctober 13, 2025 at 11:33#10183250 likes
It's fine and perfectly reasonable to say to yourself "i could have done _____ differently, for _____ reasons", but the phrasing of the question is "could anyone have made a different choice". We tell ourselves we should/could have made different choices as a narrative that will help us make different choices in the future, but the truth is the choice we made was already made.
I don't see the point. I agree, a choice made cannot be changed. But this does not negate the proposition that one could have made a different choice at the time when that choice was being made. This is just a feature of the nature of time. At the present, when time is passing we are free to make different choices. So when I look backward in time, I can say that "I could have made a different choice", meaning that at that time I was free to choose an alternative. It does not mean that it is possible that I actually made a choice other than I did. That, I believe, is a gross misunderstanding of the op, due to the ambiguity of "could have".
There's an ancient phrase that "you can't step into the same river twice", and if you believe the validity of the phrase, then you will answer no to the question, but otherwise, you will answer yes. For me to answer "yes", it would imply that the "anyone" had different knowledge or at least knew they were about to do something wrong or imperfectly.
I think this is incorrect. I think you simply misunderstand the op's use of "could have", as explained above.
I had no idea a single choice could occur over a period of time. Could you elaborate on that? For example, what's the grey area between doing and not doing?
How long does it take you to decide? Do you not deliberate? Take a simple math question for example, like 14x8-32+18, and time how long it takes you to decide what the answer is. Some choices take days, weeks, even years, to be decided.
Harry HinduOctober 13, 2025 at 12:32#10183320 likes
Could anyone have made a different choice in the past than the ones they made? How would I know the answer to this question?
Take any choice you made in the past as an example. What were the reasons you made that choice? If given the same reasons would you have made a different choice? How and why?
It seems to me that you only realize you could have made a different choice if you had access to different information, or reasons, than you did at the moment you made the choice. As such realizing you could have made a different choice always comes after the fact that you made the choice and now know the consequences and other possible choices that could have been made (more information), that was not available at the moment of decision.
So no, you could not have made a different choice because that would have meant that you had different information than you did when you made the decision.
Pinocchio was talked into going to a fun park instead of school, but the fun park turned into a place where children were turned into donkeys, and Pinocchio almost didn't escape.
Pinocchio was a wooden puppet, and a Blue Fairy turned him into a real boy and appointed Jimmy Cricket to help him make good decisions. A problem we have is not always knowing right from wrong. If we are lucky, we will have an uncomfortable feeling if we are considering doing something wrong, but often things are moving too fast, or we honestly believe we are doing the right thing, or we rationalize it isn't that bad, and we find out too late that it was the wrong and the consequences were that bad or worse, and then we get the uncomfortable feeling, and feelings of regret may follow. That uncomfortable feeling is like Jimmy Cricket trying to keep Pinocchio out of trouble.
Humans are pretty well programmed to be cooperative and moral, just as all social animals are programmed with social rules. But of course, things can go wrong, mostly because we don't know enough to know the right thing to do. Cicero said, God's law is 'right reason.' When perfectly understood, it is called 'wisdom.' When applied by government in regulating human relations it is called 'justice. Cicero
Today, we are very concerned about being smart, but unfortunately, we have neglected the need to develop wisdom. I think this cultural change leads to some serious problems, but at the same time, we have learned so many important things, and I hope this all balances out to a better future.
Sure, it exists, but decision making structures (both machine and biological) are designed to filter out the randomness out and leverage only deterministic processes. I mean, neither transistors nor neurons would function at all without quantum effects like tunneling, but both are designed to produce a repeatable classical effect, not a random one
Yes, that's their design. And when someone is contemplating an important decision, they bring all of that design to bear on the problem. How much of our decision making prowess do we bring to deciding which urinal to use in the public bathroom? Very, very little. What is taking the place of that unused neurological function? Habit perhaps or pattern matching. But what about a novel (no habit nor pattern) yet unimportant "choice"? It may not fulfill the statistical definition of the word "random", but in the absence of a repeatable, logical train of thought, it functionally resembles "randomness".
ProtagoranSocratistOctober 14, 2025 at 14:31#10185570 likes
I don't see the point. I agree, a choice made cannot be changed. But this does not negate the proposition that one could have made a different choice at the time when that choice was being made. This is just a feature of the nature of time. At the present, when time is passing we are free to make different choices. So when I look backward in time, I can say that "I could have made a different choice", meaning that at that time I was free to choose an alternative. It does not mean that it is possible that I actually made a choice other than I did. That, I believe, is a gross misunderstanding of the op, due to the ambiguity of "could have".
That's fine, you can believe it's you or someone else could have done something differently, but it's just an opinion. For me, i think its really important to separate imaginary from real, hypothetical from not.
I think this is incorrect. I think you simply misunderstand the op's use of "could have", as explained above.
No, im not misunderstanding anything. It's a very simple logical exercise. When someone misunderstands text, it's better to just explain what is being musunderstood if you have the better understanding.
But yes, i was wrong that "if you believe that quote, you will agree with me", but to me the trains of knowledge are consistent: if i can't step in the same river twice (as the river is always changing), then i also couldn't have done anything differently in the past...but if you reason "i have a local river called river calhoun, and i have stepped in it twice! Heraclitus was wrong!", then i can see why you would believe that you could have made different choices in the past.
Maybe it's the same river if there's no current, and it becomes a different one as the current starts, but as another user has said about the "could" question, whether you can step in the same river twice is a matter of perception.
Truth SeekerOctober 14, 2025 at 17:08#10185920 likes
So no, you could not have made a different choice because that would have meant that you had different information than you did when you made the decision.
I agree.
Truth SeekerOctober 14, 2025 at 17:28#10185950 likes
Reply to noAxioms Thank you for your thoughtful and technically well-informed reply. Let me address your key points one by one.
1. On Decoherence vs. Propagation of Quantum Effects
I agree that quantum coherence is not required for a quantum event to have macroscopic consequences. My point, however, is that once decoherence has occurred, the resulting branch (or outcome) behaves classically, and further amplification of that quantum difference depends on the sensitivity to initial conditions within the system in question.
So while a chaotic system like the atmosphere can indeed amplify microscopic differences, the relevant question is how often quantum noise actually changes initial conditions at scales that matter for macroscopic divergence. The overwhelming majority of microscopic variations wash out statistically - only in rare, non-averaging circumstances do they cascade upward. Hence, quantum randomness provides the ultimate floor of uncertainty, but not a practically observable driver of weather dynamics.
2. On the Timescale of Divergence
I appreciate your breakdown - minutes for human choice, months for weather, millennia for asteroid trajectories, etc. That seems broadly reasonable as an order-of-magnitude intuition under MWI or any interpretation that preserves causal continuity. Whats worth emphasizing, though, is that those divergence times describe when outcomes become empirically distinguishable, not when quantum indeterminacy begins influencing them. The influence starts at the quantum event; its just that the macroscopic consequences take time to manifest and become measurable.
3. On Determinism and Randomness in Complex Systems
I also agree that classical thermodynamics is chaotic, and that even an infinitesimal perturbation can, in principle, lead to vastly different outcomes. However, that doesnt mean the macroscopic weather is quantum random in any meaningful sense - only that its deterministic equations are sensitive to initial data we can never measure with infinite precision. The randomness, therefore, is epistemic, not ontic arising from limited knowledge rather than fundamental indeterminacy.
Quantum randomness sets the ultimate limit of predictability, but chaos is what magnifies that limit into practical unpredictability.
4. On Decision-Making Systems and Quantum Filtering
I completely agree that biological and technological systems are designed to suppress or filter quantum noise. The fact that transistors, neurons, and ion channels function reliably at all is testament to that design. Quantum tunneling, superposition, or entanglement may underlie the microphysics, but the emergent computation (neural or digital) operates in the classical regime. So while randomness exists, most functional systems are robustly deterministic within the energy and temperature ranges they inhabit.
* Decoherence kills coherence extremely fast in macroscopic environments.
* Chaotic systems can amplify any difference, including quantum ones, but not all microscopic noise scales up meaningfully.
* Macroscopic unpredictability is largely classical chaos, not ongoing quantum indeterminacy.
* Living and engineered systems filter quantum randomness to maintain stability and reproducibility.
So while I agree with you that quantum events can, in principle, propagate to the macro-scale through chaotic amplification, I maintain that in natural systems like the atmosphere, such amplification is statistically negligible in practice - the weather is unpredictable, but not quantumly so.
Metaphysician UndercoverOctober 14, 2025 at 23:39#10186350 likes
But yes, i was wrong that "if you believe that quote, you will agree with me", but to me the trains of knowledge are consistent: if i can't step in the same river twice (as the river is always changing), then i also couldn't have done anything differently in the past...but if you reason "i have a local river called river calhoun, and i have stepped in it twice! Heraclitus was wrong!", then i can see why you would believe that you could have made different choices in the past.
I really don't see how your analogy about the two rivers is relevant. The question is, could the person, at the time prior to stepping into the river, have decided at that time, not to step into the river. I think that was a real possibility to the person at that time. Therefore at that time the person could have decided not to step into it. How do you think stepping into the same river twice is relevant?
ProtagoranSocratistOctober 14, 2025 at 23:51#10186380 likes
The question is, could the person, at the time prior to stepping into the river, have decided at that time, not to step into the river
Stop trying to change the framing of OPs question: the question is "anyone". This kind of behavior is confusing. It's not a hypothetical scenario, because literally is possible in logic games and scenarios. Read the sleeping beauty thread if you don't agree.
I did my best to explain my logic. I will not repeat myself.
My point, however, is that once decoherence has occurred, the resulting branch (or outcome) behaves classically, and further amplification of that quantum difference depends on the sensitivity to initial conditions within the system in question.
With that I will agree. It's quite a different statement than the one at which I balked before.
So while a chaotic system like the atmosphere can indeed amplify microscopic differences, the relevant question is how often quantum noise actually changes initial conditions at scales that matter for macroscopic divergence.
How often? Ever time for a chaotic system. Takes time to diverge, but given a trillion decoherence events in a marble (not even in the atmosphere) in the space of a nanosecond, there's a lot more than a trillion worlds resulting from that, and the weather will be different in all of them, assuming (unreasonably) no further splits. I mean, eventually there's only so many different weather patterns and by chance some of then start looking like each other (does that qualify as strange attractors?). But the marble has a fair chance of still being a marble in almost all of those worlds.
The overwhelming majority of microscopic variations wash out statistically - only in rare, non-averaging circumstances do they cascade upward.
This is the part for which a reference would help. Clearly we still disagree on this point. The 'butterfly effect' specifically used weather as its example. Small changes matter. Not sometime, but all of them: any difference amplifies.
2. On the Timescale of Divergence
...
Whats worth emphasizing, though, is that those divergence times describe when outcomes become empirically distinguishable
Well, first, to distinguish two outcomes, both must be observed by the same observer. That's not going to happen. Secondly, the butterfly can have an empirical effect immediately, but the difference is what takes perhaps a couple months.
I also agree that classical thermodynamics is chaotic, and that even an infinitesimal perturbation can, in principle, lead to vastly different outcomes. However, that doesnt mean the macroscopic weather is quantum random in any meaningful sense - only that its deterministic equations are sensitive to initial data we can never measure with infinite precision.
The deterministic equations (in a simulation say) are not to infinite detail and precision, so yes, quantum effects are ignored. The real equations are not deterministic since they are (theoretically) infinitely precise, and incomplete since quantum randomness cannot be part of the initial conditions. There are probably no initial conditions. Such a thing would require counterfactual definiteness, which is possible but not terribly likely.
The randomness, therefore, is epistemic, not ontic arising from limited knowledge rather than fundamental indeterminacy.
You don't know that. Yes, there are deterministic interpretations, but even given MWI (quite deterministic) and perfect knowledge, not even God can predict where the photon will hit the screen, and that's not even a chaotic effect.
I completely agree that biological and technological systems are designed to suppress or filter quantum noise.
Which is why a computer typically runs the same code identically every time, given identical inputs. Ditto for a brain. Both work this way even given a non-deterministic interpretation of physics.
The fact that transistors, neurons, and ion channels function reliably at all is testament to that design. Quantum tunneling, superposition, or entanglement may underlie the microphysics, but the emergent computation (neural or digital) operates in the classical regime.
Again, agree, which is why I suspect a human can be fully simulated using a classical simulation that ignores quantum effects, unless of course the human simulated happens to want to perform quantum experiments in his simulated lab.
So while randomness exists, most functional systems are robustly deterministic within the energy and temperature ranges they inhabit.
Sort of. Don't forget outside factors. My deterministic braIn might nevertheless decide to wear a coat or not depending on some quantum event months ago that made it cold or warm out today.
* Decoherence kills coherence extremely fast in macroscopic environments.
* Chaotic systems can amplify any difference, including quantum ones, but not all microscopic noise scales up meaningfully.
* Macroscopic unpredictability is largely classical chaos, not ongoing quantum indeterminacy.
* Living and engineered systems filter quantum randomness to maintain stability and reproducibility.
:up:
Mind you, I agree that not all microscopic noise scales up meaningfully, but only because many systems (bricks for instance) are not all that chaotic at classical scales. The weather is not one of them, so I deny this below:
[/quote]I maintain that in natural systems like the atmosphere, such amplification is statistically negligible in practice[/quote]
[quote=noAxioms]neither transistors nor neurons would function at all without quantum effects like tunneling, but both are designed to produce a repeatable classical effect, not a random one[/quote] Quoting LuckyR
Yes, that's their design. And when someone is contemplating an important decision, they bring all of that design to bear on the problem.
You make it sound so rational.
Take the 'should I cheat on my spouse' decision. I think chemistry, possibly more than rational logic, tends to influence such decisions. I wonder if robots currently can demonstrate that sort of internal conflict of interests.
What's that got to do with the what is effectively a free will/determinism debate? Free will is typically pitched as the rational side, with the chemicals often portrayed in the role of 'being compelled otherwise by physics'. Nonsense. Both are physics, and you're definitely responsible for your choice.
How much of our decision making prowess do we bring to deciding which urinal to use in the public bathroom? Very, very little. What is taking the place of that unused neurological function? Habit perhaps or pattern matching. But what about a novel (no habit nor pattern) yet unimportant "choice"? It may not fulfill the statistical definition of the word "random", but in the absence of a repeatable, logical train of thought, it functionally resembles "randomness".
Agree, until you suggest that you are actually leveraging quantum randomness when doing something like urinal selection (which definitely has rules to it, and is thus a poor example), or rock-paper-scissors, where unpredictability (but not randomness) takes the day.
I had no idea a single choice could occur over a period of time.
Good indication that you're talking past somebody. I also consider choice to be a process, not an event. From experimentation, it seems that it is essentially made before one becomes aware of the choice having been made, but even once made, one can change one's mind.
The question is, could the person, at the time prior to stepping into the river, have decided at that time, not to step into the river
I think that is more or less the question, but it is ill-phrased. I can answer either way.
Classically, if the state (of all of you) immediately prior to the point (and not the process) of decision was the same, it means the process was already arriving at this conclusion. How could it not act on that process, regardless of where you consider that mechanism to take place? If you don't mean the state at that point, then when?
For instance, given two identical states hours (minutes, seconds?) before the decision, could the two states evolve differently? Yea, sure. My example above about choosing to wear a coat today leverages that sort of 'deciding otherwise'. But that's a case of, immediately before the decision, the environment being different, despite identical states some time prior.
All that seems utterly irrelevant to one being responsible for the decision. If you choose to skip the coat today and you get uncomfortably cold when you go out, who's fault do you think that is? Physics or you? Free will doesn't seem to have anything to do with it.
Metaphysician UndercoverOctober 15, 2025 at 01:52#10186480 likes
Classically, if the state (of all of you) immediately prior to the point (and not the process) of decision was the same, it means the process was already arriving at this conclusion. How could it not act on that process, regardless of where you consider that mechanism to take place? If you don't mean the state at that point, then when?
I don't think we can accurately talk about real points within what is assumed to be a continuous process. This is the problem with representing the end of the decision making process as the "conclusion". "Conclusions" implies an end point. In reality, even as we are acting we are free to change our minds as the conditions require, so "conclusion" is arbitrarily assigned.
Therefore, to speak about a point immediately prior to the point of conclusion, really confuses the issue. When we remove those arbitrarily assumed "points", then we have a process which is in theory infinitely divisible. Then at any time in that duration the process could theoretically be changed. Even between your two arbitrary points, A being immediately prior to B, being the point of decision, there must be a duration of time during which a change in the process could occur between the arbitrarily assumed A and B.
The further problem however, would be the mechanism of such a change. Since I've already outlawed points, to get to this position, I cannot now say that the change happens at a point in between the two. This leaves a problem.
ProtagoranSocratistOctober 15, 2025 at 02:01#10186520 likes
I also consider choice to be a process, not an event.
It can be either one: i can think about how i want to murder someone (technically, part of the choice, in the "choice is process" logic). If i decide it's the right decision, then the choice is made, and then i would start answering the question of how. I can change my mind still during this process, saying to myself "no, it's a bad idea to do this", i made a second choice, putting an end to my "how" process. Either way, i made two choices.
Truth SeekerOctober 15, 2025 at 14:36#10187850 likes
I appreciate your clarification. I agree that once decoherence has occurred, each branch behaves classically. My emphasis was never that quantum events never cascade upward, but that most do not in practice. Chaotic sensitivity doesnt guarantee amplification of all microscopic noise; it only ensures that some minute differences can diverge over time. The key is statistical significance, not logical possibility.
The fact that there are trillions of decoherence events per nanosecond doesnt entail that every one creates a macroscopically distinct weather trajectory. Many microscopic perturbations occur below the systems Lyapunov horizon and are absorbed by dissipative averaging. The butterfly effect metaphor was intended to illustrate sensitivity, not to claim that every quantum fluctuation alters the weather.
So:
Yes, chaos implies amplification of some differences.
No, it doesnt imply that quantum noise routinely dominates macroscopic evolution.
Empirically, ensemble models of the atmosphere converge statistically even when perturbed at Planck-scale levels, suggesting the mean state is robust, though individual trajectories differ. (See Lorenz 1969; Palmer 2015.)
2. On Determinism, Ontic vs. Epistemic Randomness
Youre right that we cant know that randomness is purely epistemic. My point is pragmatic: theres no experimental evidence that ontic indeterminacy penetrates to the macroscopic domain in any controllable way.
MWI, Bohmian mechanics, and objective-collapse theories all make the same statistical predictions. So whether randomness is ontic or epistemic is metaphysical until we have a test that distinguishes them.
Even if indeterminacy is ontic, our weather forecasts, computer simulations, and neural computations behave classically because decoherence has rendered the underlying quantum superpositions unobservable.
So Id phrase it this way:
The world might be ontically indeterministic, but macroscopic unpredictability is functionally classical.
3. On Functional Robustness
Completely agree: both transistors and neurons rely on quantum effects yet yield stable classical outputs. The entire architecture of computation, biological or digital, exists precisely because thermal noise, tunnelling, and decoherence are averaged out or counterbalanced.
Thats why we can meaningfully say the brain implements a computation without appealing to hidden quantum randomness. Penrose-style arguments for quantum consciousness have not found empirical support.
4. On Choice, Process, and Responsibility
I share your intuition that a choice unfolds over time, not as a single instant.
Libet-type studies show neural precursors before conscious awareness, yet subsequent vetoes demonstrate ongoing integration rather than fatalistic pre-commitment.
Determinism doesnt nullify responsibility. The self is part of the causal web. Physics made me do it is no more an excuse than my character made me do it. In either case, the agent and the cause coincide.
Thus, even in a deterministic universe, moral responsibility is preserved as long as actions flow from the agents own motivations and reasoning processes rather than external coercion.
5. Summary
Decoherence ? classicality; not all micro noise scales up.
Chaos ? sensitivity; not universality of amplification.
Randomness ? possibly ontic, but operationally epistemic.
Functional systems ? quantum-grounded but classically robust.
Agency ? compatible with determinism when causation runs through the agent.
Quantum indeterminacy might underlie reality, but classical chaos and cognitive computation sit comfortably atop it.
Responsibility remains a structural property of agency, not an escape hatch from physics.
Agree, until you suggest that you are actually leveraging quantum randomness when doing something like urinal selection (which definitely has rules to it, and is thus a poor example), or rock-paper-scissors, where unpredictability (but not randomness) takes the day.
I concede that the term "randomness" in the context of this conversation is not true statistical Randomness, rather a placeholder term to describe the absence of a logical train of thought as pertains to decision making, pondering, if you will. Thus I'll take your "agree"ment and call it a day.
We can cut to the chase, everyone agrees that humans ponder decisions, weigh the pros and cons of possible choices. What folks disagree on is whether this pondering is a functional illusion, such that I was always going to select chocolate, never vanilla, regardless of going through the act of pondering my "choice". In this scenario one can never go back and make a different "choice", because the concept of "choice" was an illusion. It was always going to be chocolate. Most, however believe that pondering is functionally real and thus yes, they could have selected vanilla. There is no Real World way to prove it one way or another and the answer similarly has no Real World implication since it can only be demonstrated theoretically, never in reality. But I find it more psychologically coherent to believe what I perceive, then to assume my experience is an (unprovable) illusion.
I appreciate your clarification. I agree that once decoherence has occurred, each branch behaves classically. My emphasis was never that quantum events never cascade upward, but that most do not in practice. Chaotic sensitivity doesnt guarantee amplification of all microscopic noise; it only ensures that some minute differences can diverge over time.
The mathematics says otherwise. Any quantum decoherence event, say the decay of some nucleus in a brick somewhere, will have an effect on Mars possibly within 10 minutes, and will cause a completely different weather pattern on Mars withing months. The brick on the other hand (after even a second) will have all its atoms having different individual momentums, but the classical brick will still be mostly unchanged after a year. This is a logical necessity for any quantum event. If it has no such cascading effect, then it didn't actually happen, by any non-counterfactual definition of 'happened'.
The fact that there are trillions of decoherence events per nanosecond doesnt entail that every one creates a macroscopically distinct weather trajectory.
If it doesn't, then the event probably took place outside our event horizon, which is currently about 16 GLY away, not far beyond the Hubble sphere.
Many microscopic perturbations occur below the systems Lyapunov horizon and are absorbed by dissipative averaging.
Sure, almost all perturbations occur below a system's Lyapunov horizon, which just means that more time is needed (couple days in the case of weather) for chaotic differences to become classically distinct.
No, it doesnt imply that quantum noise routinely dominates macroscopic evolution
Depends on your definition of 'dominates'. Yes, the state of a chaotic system is a function of every input, no matter how trivial. Yes, they all average out and statistically the weather is more or less the same each year, cold in winter, etc. But the actual state of the weather at a given moment is not classically determined. There is no event that doesn't matter.
Coin flips are a lot like the weather. Take trillions of coins, black & white on opposite sides, and throw them on ground and look at it from an airplane. It looks gray every time, no matter how many tries you attempt. But up close, each toss is distinct, and if those distinctions amplify in a chaotic manner, different patterns will form with each toss, and those classical patterns will very much be visible for the airplane.
I was hoping for Conway's Game of Life to drive the chaos, but that game is actually not very chaotic, and the resulting patterns probably would just look mostly white from a distance with no distinct structures emerging like hurricanes.
Empirically, ensemble models of the atmosphere converge statistically even when perturbed at Planck-scale levels
Perturbations in ensemble models are far larger than Planck level. Yes, hurricanes, once formed, tend to be somewhat predictable for 8-10 days out. The perturbations are effectively running the model multiple times with minor differences, generating a series of diverging predictions. You average out those predictions to get a most probable path. Run those difference out to 3 weeks and major divergence will result.
My point is pragmatic: theres no experimental evidence that ontic indeterminacy penetrates to the macroscopic domain in any controllable way.
Quantum theory (not any of its interpretations even) does not allow any indeterminacy to be controlled. The mathematical model from the theory also disallows any information to be gathered from the randomness. If it were otherwise, the theory would be falsified.
MWI, Bohmian mechanics, and objective-collapse theories
I hate to be a bother, but there is no collapse at all under MWI, and DBB is phenomenological collapse only, not ontic. This is a set of objective collapse interpretations posited separately by Ghirardi, Weber, Penrose.
The interpretations you list are deterministic. Most others are not. Under MWI, you could have, and actually did, choose otherwise (but was that you?). Under DBB, you could not have chosen otherwise.
.. all make the same statistical predictions.
Every interpretation makes the same statistical predictions. Superdeterminism doesn't, but it's not a valid interpretation of QM, just an alternate interpretation of the physics.
Still, I agree with your point 2. It doesn't matter whether randomness is ontic or epistemic. There will never be a test for that.
3. On Functional Robustness
Completely agree: both transistors and neurons rely on quantum effects yet yield stable classical outputs. The entire architecture of computation, biological or digital, exists precisely because thermal noise, tunnelling, and decoherence are averaged out or counterbalanced.
Thats why we can meaningfully say the brain implements a computation without appealing to hidden quantum randomness.
I agree with this, but remember that brains and computers are not closed systems, and the inputs might be subject to chaotic effects. It is the instability of those inputs that mostly accounts for a person 'having done otherwise' in two diverging worlds.
Physics made me do it is no more an excuse than my character made me do it.
See 'insanity defense', which is effectively the latter. Still responsible, but different kind of jail.
What folks disagree on is whether this pondering is a functional illusion, such that I was always going to select chocolate, never vanilla, regardless of going through the act of pondering my "choice".
The pondering is not an illusion. With the possible exception of epiphenomenalism, the pondering takes place, and the decision is the result of that. Given DBB style determinism, your decision to select chocolate was set at the big bang. Not true under almost any other interpretation, but under all of them (any scientific interpretation), the chocolate decision was a function of state just prior to the pondering, which does not mean it wasn't your decision.
Under non-QM philosophies, there's more going on than what science knows about, and all bets are off. How this makes you more responsible has never been justified to my satisfaction, but if an entity external to the universe is what's choosing chocolate, then that entity (and not the body it controls) is what's responsible to another entity also not part of the universe.
Of all that, the first paragraph is a monist take. The dualists are the ones that suggest that one is not responsible (to whom?) for their actions if the actions are due to a view with which they don't agree. All very straw man.
In this [deterministic] scenario one can never go back and make a different "choice", because the concept of "choice" was an illusion.
That's a total crock. It being a choice has nothing to do with it being deterministic or not, since choice is the mechanism by which multiple options are narrowed down to one. Your assertion makes the classical mistake of conflating a sound mechanism for selecting from multiple options, with being compelled against one's will to select otherwise, the latter of which actually does make it not a real choice, and thus takes away (not gives) responsibility.
In the end, one cannot make two choices. One cannot have chosen vanilla if chocolate was chosen, true in deterministic, random, and compelled scenarios.
Any choice making mechanism requires as much deterministic processes as possible, minimizing the randomness which is the alternative.
3rd alternative: let somebody else choose for you, which seems to make not you responsible, but rather the other person. Imagine crossing the street this way. You close your eyes and go when somebody else says to. If you get hit, it's his fault, but you still are the one enduring the consequences.
I don't think we can accurately talk about real points within what is assumed to be a continuous process.
Agree. Also don't think the process of making a choice has an end point, like all pondering has ceased and all that's left is to implement the choice (say "chocolate please" to the ice cream guy). Cute idealized description, but that's not how it works.
You seem to agree, balking that 'conclusion' implies an end point.
Therefore, to speak about a point immediately prior to the point of conclusion
Ah, now we get into adjacent points and Zeno and that whole rat hole. Agree, we avoid that path.
Since I've already outlawed points, to get to this position, I cannot now say that the change happens at a point in between the two. This leaves a problem.
What's the problem then? Change happens over time. Where's the problem? I made no mention of points in that.
What happened to decisions and the eventual state of no longer being able to have chosen otherwise?
It can be either one: i can think about how i want to murder someone (technically, part of the choice, in the "choice is process" logic). If i decide it's the right decision, then the choice is made, and then i would start answering the question of how. I can change my mind still during this process, saying to myself "no, it's a bad idea to do this", i made a second choice, putting an end to my "how" process. Either way, i made two choices.
What I got from this is that choices can be broken down into sub-choices, and conversely combined into larger choices.
Of course the steps need not be thus ordered. I have pondered 'how to murder' far more often than any actual decision to go and do it, not counting all the bug smitings and mammal murders.
Took out my first Opossum just a couple weeks ago. It wasn't a conscious choice to do so.
ProtagoranSocratistOctober 16, 2025 at 20:31#10191390 likes
What's the problem then? Change happens over time. Where's the problem? I made no mention of points in that.
What happened to decisions and the eventual state of no longer being able to have chosen otherwise?
I think the problem is, that if change happens over time, and a person can always change one's mind as time passes, then how does that state of not being able to choose otherwise ever come about?
I think that "not being able to choose" is always there, to some degree, as what is impossible. One cannot make happen what is impossible. So as time passes what is possible, and what is impossible, is always changing. That's what change is. We make our decisions based on how we understand what is possible and what is impossible, in relation to what is wanted. We always misunderstand, to some degree.
Therefore it's always possible to choose otherwise, all the time. But some things are not possible, even if we think they are, and try to make them happen. Likewise, many things which are possible we never even consider.
Truth SeekerOctober 17, 2025 at 11:05#10192980 likes
1. On decoherence, chaos and everything matters
Youre right to insist that every physical event in principle influences the future state of the universe. But there are three separate claims mixed together here, and they need to be untangled:
Claim A: Every decoherence event must produce a macroscopically different future.*
This is false as a practical claim. Mathematically, you can map a micro-perturbation forward, but most microscopic differences remain confined beneath the systems Lyapunov horizon and are washed out by dissipation and averaging. Saying it mattered in principle is not the same as it produced a distinct, observable macroscopic outcome.
Claim B: If a quantum event didnt cascade to macroscopic difference, then it didnt happen.
This is a category error. An events occurrence is not defined by whether it produces long-range, observable divergence in weather on Mars. Decoherence can and does happen locally without producing macroscopic differences that survive coarse-graining. To deny the event happened because it didnt alter the weather is to adopt a peculiar, counterfactual definition of happened that isnt used in physics.
Claim C: Because chaotic systems amplify differences, microscopic quantum noise always matters.
Chaos gives sensitivity to initial conditions, not guaranteed macroscopic divergence from every tiny perturbation within any fixed observational timescale. Some perturbations are amplified quickly; many are damped or trapped inside subsystems and never produce a new, robust classical structure. So yes, everything is part of the state functionally, but that does not imply practical, observable macroscopic branching for every microscopic event.
2. On ensemble forecasting and pragmatic unpredictability
Ensemble weather models show that small perturbations grow and forecasts diverge over days to weeks. That demonstrates sensitivity, not an omnipresent quantum-to-macroscopic channel that we can exploit or even detect in a controlled way. Ensemble perturbations used in practice are far larger than Planck-scale corrections; their convergence tells us about statistical predictability and model error, it does not prove ontic indeterminacy at the macroscale. In short: models are evidence of chaotic growth, not of routine quantum domination of weather.
3. Interpretations of quantum mechanics - collapse, MWI, Bohmian, etc.
Two helpful distinctions:
Predictive equivalence vs metaphysics.
Most mainstream interpretations (Copenhagen-style pragmatism, Everett/MWI, Bohmian/DBB, GRW-style objective collapse) make the same experimental predictions for standard quantum experiments. Where they differ is metaphysical: whether there is a literal branching reality (MWI), hidden variables (Bohmian), or real collapses (GRW/Penrose). That difference matters philosophically but not experimentally so far.
Determinism vs practical unpredictability.
MWI is best understood as deterministic at the universal wave function level (no collapse), while Bohmian mechanics is deterministic at the level of particle trajectories guided by the wave function. Both can produce the same Born probabilities for observable results. Objective collapse theories, if true, would introduce genuine stochastic events at the fundamental level. Superdeterminism attempts to recover determinism by postulating global correlations that undermine usual independence assumptions - but its philosophically and scientifically unattractive because it erodes the basis for experimental inference.
So: yes, many interpretations are deterministic; some are not. But the existence of multiple empirically-equivalent interpretations means the metaphysical verdict isnt settled by current experiments.
4. Functional robustness (brains, transistors, computation)
Absolutely: brains and silicon devices exploit enormous redundancy and averaging to achieve robust classical behaviour despite quantum microphysics. That robustness is precisely why we can treat neurons as implementing computations without invoking exotic quantum effects. Inputs and boundary conditions matter: if an input to a brain were influenced by a huge amplification of a quantum event, your choices could track that influence, but thats a contingent physical story, not a metaphysical proof of libertarian free will.
5. About happening, counterfactuals and responsibility
Two related points:
Happening and counterfactual dependence.
Whether an event happened should not be defined by whether it caused a macroscopic divergence millions of miles away. Physics generally treats events as happening if they leave local, causal traces (entanglement, records, thermodynamic irreversibility), not by whether they produce globally visible differences across light-years.
Responsibility and determinism.
Even if one accepts a deterministic physical description (whether classical or quantum-deterministic under MWI or Bohmian), that does not automatically dissolve ordinary moral responsibility. Thats the compatibilist position: responsibility depends on capacities, reasons-responsiveness, and the appropriate psychological relations, not on metaphysical indeterminism. Saying my decision was set at the Big Bang is metaphysically dramatic but doesnt change whether you deliberated, had conscious intentions, and acted for your reason(s) - which are precisely the things our ethics and law respond to.
6. About pondering and the illusion of choice
Youre right to resist the crude conclusion that determinism makes choice an illusion. Choice is a process that unfolds over time; it can be broken into sub-choices and revisions. Whether decisions are determined or involve ontic randomness does not by itself answer whether they were genuinely yours. If you deliberated, weighed reasons, and acted from those deliberations, we rightly treat that as agency. Randomness doesnt create agency; reasons and responsiveness do.
We shouldnt conflate three different claims: (A) that micro events in principle influence the universal state; (B) that such influence routinely produces distinct, observable macroscopic outcomes; and (C) that metaphysical determinism therefore undermines agency. In practice, decoherence + dissipation + coarse-graining mean most quantum perturbations dont make detectable macroscopic differences. Interpretations of quantum mechanics disagree about metaphysics but agree on predictions. And finally, even in a deterministic physical world, agency and moral responsibility can still be meaningful because they hinge on capacities, reasons, and psychological continuity, not on metaphysical indeterminism.
The pondering is not an illusion. With the possible exception of epiphenomenalism, the pondering takes place, and the decision is the result of that. Given DBB style determinism, your decision to select chocolate was set at the big bang. Not true under almost any other interpretation, but under all of them (any scientific interpretation), the chocolate decision was a function of state just prior to the pondering, which does not mean it wasn't your decision.
Yes, I know it isn't a true illusion. I said it's a "functional illusion", meaning that since the chocolate conclusion was set at the Big Bang (as you noted), no amount of pondering vanilla was going to result in it's selection, or at least as you correctly noted at the mind state just before the pondering started. Thus while we all agree pondering occurs, as I mentioned, folks disagree whether both sides of the internal argument can result in chocolate or vanilla on one hand or always chocolate on the other.
A distinction without importance since in reality there is no practical difference. My advice: choose the option that sits best with you worldview and move on (to questions that can actually make a difference here on planet Earth).
Claim A: Every decoherence event must produce a macroscopically different future.
High probability of that, but the claim is not there. Again, Norton's dome can result in the same state from multiple different initial states, thus falsifying that claim. It's a classical analysis, and it would be interesting to see if a similar scenario could be done in the quantum realm, such as different pairs of photons (coming from different directions, but with the same collective energy/momentum) combining into identical states of electron/positron pair.
None of what I posted about macroscopic differences is 'in principle'. It's very much in practice, and differences don't remain contained. All such events are beneath any systems Lyapunov horizon and thus take at least that much time to show up as macroscopic differences.
Claim B: If a quantum event didnt cascade to macroscopic difference, then it didnt happen.
That claim presumes the principle of counterfactual definiteness (PCD) is false, which it is in almost every interpretation. But given that principle, the claim is false. I said as much in prior posts. It cascading into a macroscopic difference is way different than the difference being observed, which is of course impossible. Nobody can observe both the live and dead cat.
So the quantum event doesn't technically alter the weather since that wording implies there was one base weather that would have otherwise been. No, each event is a critical part of the cause of any sufficiently distant weather state, a very different claim than 'alters'.
I think I agree with this one, with 'always' being replaced by 'always to a lot of decimal places'.
Some perturbations are amplified quickly; many are damped or trapped inside subsystems and never produce a new, robust classical structure.
Sort of. Imagine something tiny annihilating into radiation that ends up in deep space, never hitting anything. Also the tiny thing, had it not died like that, would also never have interacted with anything else. That's an example of that 'trapped', but it's also an example of an event that never happened in the absence of PCD.
2. On ensemble forecasting and pragmatic unpredictability
Ensemble weather models show that small perturbations grow and forecasts diverge over days to weeks. That demonstrates sensitivity, not an omnipresent quantum-to-macroscopic channel that we can exploit or even detect in a controlled way.
Correct. None of those models run at quantum scale precision. The input data is more like data points that are kilometers apart, not nanometers apart.
More precision would be nice, but data gathering is limited and small scale differences (molecular?) make no significant difference in just the 10 days these models are good for.
Most mainstream interpretations (Copenhagen-style pragmatism, Everett/MWI, Bohmian/DBB, GRW-style objective collapse) make the same experimental predictions for standard quantum experiments.
If there are any interpretations that make different predictions, then either the interpretation is wrong, or QM is.
Where they differ is metaphysical: whether there is a literal branching reality (MWI), hidden variables (Bohmian), or real collapses (GRW/Penrose). That difference matters philosophically but not experimentally so far.
Just so. This is why when you take a graduate level course in quantum mechanics, they might spend a day on interpretations, but it being philosophy, it has no scientific value. The course teaches theory, not philosophy. The determinism debate is also philosophy.
The bit I said about some events never happening? That's philosophy. Empirically, whether it happened or not is indistinguishable, so it isn't part of theory.
Determinism vs practical unpredictability.
MWI is best understood as deterministic at the universal wave function level (no collapse), while Bohmian mechanics is deterministic at the level of particle trajectories guided by the wave function.
Something like that. The wave function has multiple solutions, so DBB needs more than just that to guide particles to one outcome.
Responsibility and determinism.
Even if one accepts a deterministic physical description (whether classical or quantum-deterministic under MWI or Bohmian)
MWI is deterministic, but not classical. There's no 'you' with a meaningful identity in that view. Responsibility is a classical concept and requires a pragmatic classical view of identity, regardless of interpretations of choice.
This is not contradictory. The pragmatic part of me believes all sorts of things that the rational side of me knows is wrong. I would not be fit were the case to be otherwise. Hence my being responsible for my choices.
Thats the compatibilist position: responsibility depends on capacities, reasons-responsiveness, and the appropriate psychological relations, not on metaphysical indeterminism.
I would have said that it depends on the entity being held responsible being the same entity making the choice. Determinism just doesn't factor at all into that definition.
Compatibilism is a bit different. It asserts free will in the face of determinism. I don't, but it depends on one's definition of free will. I don't think I have free will as typically defined, but that in no way relieves me of moral responsibility since I'm still making my own choices. So I don't label myself a compatibilist.
Saying my decision was set at the Big Bang is metaphysically dramatic but doesnt change whether you deliberated, had conscious intentions, and acted for your reason(s) - which are precisely the things our ethics and law respond to.
Yes. My opinion is that my decision was not at all set at the big bang, but that just means I don't buy into DBB, probably the only interpretation that suggests that.
6. About pondering and the illusion of choice
Youre right to resist the crude conclusion that determinism makes choice an illusion. Choice is a process that unfolds over time; it can be broken into sub-choices and revisions. Whether decisions are determined or involve ontic randomness does not by itself answer whether they were genuinely yours. If you deliberated, weighed reasons, and acted from those deliberations, we rightly treat that as agency. Randomness doesnt create agency; reasons and responsiveness do.
We seem to be on the same page.
In practice, decoherence + dissipation + coarse-graining mean most quantum perturbations dont make detectable macroscopic differences.
I'd even argue that none of them make detectable macroscopic differences. I mean, I measure an atom decay. Great, but I don't have a not-decay state to compare it with, so there's no 'difference'. I can imagine that other state since it is pretty simple, but I cannot imagine the evolution of that real and imagined state into a future state of a planet a year hence.
Yes, I know it isn't a true illusion. I said it's a "functional illusion", meaning that since the chocolate conclusion was set at the Big Bang (as you noted)
See just above, where only DBB suggests that chocolate choice was set at the big bang. DBB should stand for 'Da Big Bang'. Chicago folks would like that.
Thus while we all agree pondering occurs, as I mentioned, folks disagree whether both sides of the internal argument can result in chocolate or vanilla on one hand or always chocolate on the other.
I think it's all in how you frame the telling of the story. Proponents of 'vanilla being possibly chosen' would frame the story in such terms. Yea, you could have picked that, but you didn't, didja? If you had, you'd still ponder if you could have chosen chocolate.
A distinction without importance since in reality there is no practical difference.
Yes, and deal with the consequences. It's pretty easy to falsify the 'not responsible' stance since if one wasn't to be held responsible, different choices would be made. That means responsibility serves a purpose regardless of your stance.
I think the problem is, that if change happens over time, and a person can always change one's mind as time passes, then how does that state of not being able to choose otherwise ever come about?
Eventually one much act on the choice, irrevocably. You debate committing murder, but once the trigger is pulled, there's no doing otherwise. I suppose if you choose not to do it, the option remains open for quite some time.
The vanilla/chocolate debate at the ice cream shop. Exactly how late can one change one's mind before it's too late? We played a game like that with my 1 year old at a restaurant. He was feeding himself stuff from his plate with a spoon. He really like crab leg bits thrown on his plate and would eat those first. Game was to see how far we could get him to choose to eat something else, and still bail out because a crab bit was presented. I won the game when I caused an abort with the spoon already fully in his mouth. Imagine the cheering at the table, causing weird looks from others.
We're easily entertained over here.
I think that "not being able to choose" is always there, to some degree, as what is impossible. One cannot make happen what is impossible.
Yes, that's physics getting in the way of free will. I cannot get out of this jail because physics compels me to stay here. Nobody can do everything they want to.
Therefore it's always possible to choose otherwise, all the time.
Yes, that's what it means for there to be a choice. I'd argue that such choice is not always possible. Sometimes only one path is open. Sometimes not even that. Vanilla or chocolate? Well, there's a power outage at the softserve shop, so as Gene Wilder put it: You get Nothing.
ProtagoranSocratistOctober 19, 2025 at 01:31#10196400 likes
Yes, that's physics getting in the way of free will. I cannot get out of this jail because physics compels me to stay here. Nobody can do everything they want to.
or in other words, you're in a state of relative inertia: you know getting out would be hard, you know the charge isn't that severe (and don't want the extra punishment), so you sit there until someone says you can go. It's mild fear mixed with resignation.
However, in the other scenario among many, energy and angst compel you to get out because you see an opening, which is arguably still not anything you have control over...
Metaphysician UndercoverOctober 19, 2025 at 01:46#10196420 likes
Eventually one much act on the choice, irrevocably. You debate committing murder, but once the trigger is pulled, there's no doing otherwise. I suppose if you choose not to do it, the option remains open for quite some time.
It's a lot more precise than how you make it out. Imagine, the assassin sights the target. The window of opportunity is short, and the decision must be made quickly because the target moves on. So as much as the option remains, even after deciding not to pull the trigger, it would all have to be recalculated, and in reality would be a different option.
Consider firing a rocket to the moon. Everything is calculated to the exact liftoff time, and there's a small window. If there is a problem and the window is missed, everything has to be refigured. In general, and in words, it's refigured as the same option, "firing a rocket to the moon", but since it's refigured under different circumstances, it's not really the same option, just the same type of action under different conditions.
The vanilla/chocolate debate at the ice cream shop. Exactly how late can one change one's mind before it's too late? We played a game like that with my 1 year old at a restaurant. He was feeding himself stuff from his plate with a spoon. He really like crab leg bits thrown on his plate and would eat those first. Game was to see how far we could get him to choose to eat something else, and still bail out because a crab bit was presented. I won the game when I caused an abort with the spoon already fully in his mouth. Imagine the cheering at the table, causing weird looks from others.
We're easily entertained over here.
I think there is reverse psychology which comes into play here. So long as one does not pull the trigger, we can always consider doing so at a later time. But once the trigger is pulled that cannot be reversed. So, the psychology is that it is universally better not to act unless one is quite certain of success. The rocket cannot be retrieved after it's fired, so be sure of success before firing. However, if it is not fired, there will be many opportunities of the same type, therefore hold on until you're sure.
Your son got the punishment of reverse psychology. You pushed him toward failure, by inciting him to pull the trigger on something other than the best situation. Then he was embarrassed by jumping the gun, rather than patiently waiting, having to spit it out. That's why patience is a virtue.
Yes, that's what it means for there to be a choice. I'd argue that such choice is not always possible. Sometimes only one path is open. Sometimes not even that. Vanilla or chocolate? Well, there's a power outage at the softserve shop, so as Gene Wilder put it: You get Nothing.
How could there ever be only one path open? The future is always full of possibilities. And by being patient and not pulling the trigger we allow the possibilities to persist. But even falsely pulling the trigger only results in some kind of embarrassment. So if you pull the trigger and you're on the road to the softserve shop when the power goes out, you can turn around and go somewhere else. And even after the assassin fires the shot, he could fire another and another.
I believe the lesson is, that when you make the act, you put things in motion which inevitably restrict your future acts, unless your act is designed to increase your freedom, and it is successful. So the first principle is that nonaction maintains freedom. The second principle is that you might act in a way which would increase your freedom, but you need to be certain, because failure will backfire and lessen it.
Truth SeekerOctober 19, 2025 at 11:27#10196890 likes
Reply to noAxioms Thank you for the thoughtful engagement - I think were converging on several points while framing them differently.
On Claim A, I accept that Nortons Dome demonstrates classical indeterminism under non-Lipschitz conditions, though its a purely mathematical curiosity. In any physically realizable system governed by continuous differentiable dynamics, each decoherence event still alters the global quantum state. Even if that alteration remains thermodynamically undetectable within a local Lyapunov horizon, it nevertheless yields a distinct universal configuration in principle. My claim concerns this ontological divergence, not its empirical detectability.
On Claim B, youre right that the assertion depends on whether one accepts counterfactual definiteness. I was speaking from an Everett-style, decoherence-based ontology where every event contributes to a definite branch of the universal wave function. Under that framework, an event that leaves no macroscopic trace still differentiates the overall state of the universe. The difference need not be observable to be real.
For Claim C, Id refine always matters as follows: every quantum perturbation modifies the total wave function, but only some of those perturbations are amplified within our causal region into new classical structures. Others disperse or remain dynamically isolated, but they still shape the global state. Trapped and amplified are perspectival distinctions within one continuous evolution.
On determinism and responsibility, I think we share the pragmatic view. Determinism doesnt abolish agency; it merely redefines it as a complex causal process rather than an uncaused power. Responsibility survives as a social and ethical convention that regulates behaviour within the deterministic flow. To borrow my own GENE model language, deliberation and choice are emergent computations of Genes, Environments, Nutrients, and Experiences - not exemptions from causality but expressions of it.
So when I speak of choice or agency, I mean the real-time process of deliberation that precedes action, not a metaphysical ability to have done otherwise. The phenomenology of choice remains intact, even if the universes total state never could have evolved differently.
On Claim B ... I was speaking from an Everett-style, decoherence-based ontology where every event contributes to a definite branch of the universal wave function. Under that framework, an event that leaves no macroscopic trace still differentiates the overall state of the universe.
Everett interpretation does not hold to CFD, so unmeasured events effectively are not part of any specific worlds (they're not 'real': scientific definition). This is all part of the recent proof that the universe is not locally real. It can be local or real (or neither), but not both. Everett's is local. CFD is an assertion of real states, independent of measurement.
For Claim C, Id refine always matters as follows: every quantum perturbation modifies the total wave function, but only some of those perturbations are amplified within our causal region into new classical structures.
We apparently are not going to agree on this point.
The phenomenology of choice remains intact, even if the universes total state never could have evolved differently.
We agree on the responsibility point. Of note: Under Everett again, the universe can and does evolve in all possible outcomes, which includes choosing differently, not choosing at all, and of course not even existing to choose.
So as much as the option remains, even after deciding not to pull the trigger, it would all have to be recalculated, and in reality would be a different option.
Sure, one can spin a drawn out choice (to go to the moon, good example) as a series of more immediate choices that have temporal windows. The choice ends when there's somebody on the moon, at which point it's hard to change your mind about doing so anymore.
So, the psychology is that it is universally better not to act unless one is quite certain of success.
That works in some situations, but a not in a fair percentage of them. Such uncertainty prevents some people from ever getting married. Sometimes this is a good thing, but often not. Don't choose poorly, but also don't reject good choices for fear of lack of 'success'.
War is another example where that psychology is a losing one. Risk taking is part of how things are best done.
Your son got the punishment of reverse psychology.
He did? He got crab legs and loved it. He also liked the other food he was eating, so at no point was he 'punished'.
Then he was embarrassed by jumping the gun
He was 1, with no concept of embarassment yet. He was unaware of a game being played in his court. He never spit anything out. That would have been even a better score than spoon-abort, already in, but not already 'unloaded'.
How could there ever be only one path open?
Since I'm quoting movies, I remember Gandalf saying "now there is but one choice" once the entrance to Moria collapsed after they had entered. Go forth into the mine was the only option remaining. They hadn't the resources to dig their way out.
I believe the lesson is, that when you make the act, you put things in motion which inevitably restrict your future acts, unless your act is designed to increase your freedom, and it is successful.
Similar to a game of Chess or Reversi. Any move restricts possible future positions to those which follow from the new current state. In Reversi in particular, playing to maximize your freedom and minimize the opponent's freedom is definitely a winning strategy. Took me 8 years to figure that out.
So the first principle is that nonaction maintains freedom.
Not always, and not even particularly often. Not looking for food definitely curtails eventual freedom.
However, in the other scenario among many, energy and angst compel you to get out because you see an opening, which is arguably still not anything you have control over...
You many not have too much control over the appearance of opportunities to escape jail, but if one presents itself, you do have control to choose to act or not on it. It would also be foolish not to consider the positive and negative consequences of the various options, but some choice come fast enough that such rational weighing of options is not, well, an option.
Metaphysician UndercoverOctober 20, 2025 at 01:31#10198250 likes
That works in some situations, but a not in a fair percentage of them. Such uncertainty prevents some people from ever getting married. Sometimes this is a good thing, but often not. Don't choose poorly, but also don't reject good choices for fear of lack of 'success'.
War is another example where that psychology is a losing one. Risk taking is part of how things are best done.
Look what you are saying. It can just be turned around. Not getting married was the mistaken choice which shouldn't have been made. Rejecting good choices is making a poor choice. So it's just a matter of what descriptive words are used.
Risk is never the best option. It is often unavoidable, but then the best option is the one which reduces the risk. See it's just a matter of wording. And the reason why it's confusing is because we are leaving out a key aspect. Success is in relation to a goal. So "unavoidable" is determined in relation to the goal. Once we frame things as being in relation to a goal, the whole perspective is variable, depending on the goal.
A child does not need to understand the concept of embarrassment, to be embarrassed. "Cheering at the table" indicates that he was most likely embarrassed, even at 1.
Not always, and not even particularly often. Not looking for food definitely curtails eventual freedom.
I don't agree with this. "Looking for food" implies a restriction that the person is looking for something which is known to be food. This restricts the person from eating all sorts of things which may actually be good food, yet not known to be "food" to the person.
The point being that action requires choice, and choice restricts the person's freedom to select all the other possibilities. If a hamburger is the only thing the person knows to be food, then "looking for food" is a significant restriction.
Look back at the moon example. "Going to the moon" required all those choices, and each one excluded all the other possibilities. Therefore there was a whole lot of other things which could have been done in that time, with those resources, but "going to the moon" was the chosen goal, and this negated all those other possibilities.
Truth SeekerOctober 20, 2025 at 15:26#10199050 likes
Reply to noAxioms Thank you for the thoughtful clarification. I think our main divergence lies in how we treat ontic status within the Everett framework.
Youre right that Everett dispenses with counterfactual definiteness: only the total wave function is real, while definite outcomes are branch-relative. However, if every decoherence event differentiates the universal state vector, then by definition, each unmeasured quantum fluctuation still contributes to the branching structure of the multiverse. The fact that we only observe a subset of classical branches doesnt mean the rest lack existence; it only means they are decohered beyond causal contact with us.
So when I say an event that leaves no macroscopic trace still differentiates the overall state, I mean that decoherence is ontologically generative - the universes global wave function encodes every microscopic difference, even those never amplified to our classical level. From that global perspective, nothing fails to happen; it merely fails to be observable within our branch.
As for responsibility, I agree that phenomenology remains intact. Even if the total state-space evolves deterministically, subjective deliberation and outcome differentiation are still structurally real within each branch - enough to preserve the experiential grammar of choice, if not libertarian freedom.
Youre right that Everett dispenses with counterfactual definiteness: only the total wave function is real, while definite outcomes are branch-relative. However, if every decoherence event differentiates the universal state vector, then by definition, each unmeasured quantum fluctuation still contributes to the branching structure of the multiverse.
The terminology grates with me, but more or less I agree. The universal state vector cannot differentiate since there is but only one of them, so it evolves over time, just like the universal wave function. It doesn't collapse, which I think would constitute 'differentiation'.
The fact that we only observe a subset of classical branches doesnt mean the rest lack existence
Everett does not suggest separate 'branches' that have any kind of defined state. Such would be a counterfactual. So yea, Everett says that the universal wave function 'exists', period. It's a realist position, and it is that realism that is my primary beef with the view since it doesn't seem justified.
So when I say an event that leaves no macroscopic trace still differentiates the overall state, I mean that decoherence is ontologically generative - the universes global wave function encodes every microscopic difference, even those never amplified to our classical level.
Fine, but the only ones unamplified are the ones permanently in superposition relative to some classical state, such as the dead/live cat in a box never opened (said classical state).
From that global perspective, nothing fails to happen; it merely fails to be observable within our branch.
Careful. With the exception of Wigner interpretation (a solipsistic one), nothing in quantum mechanics is observer dependent. Observation plays no special role.
As for responsibility, I agree that phenomenology remains intact. Even if the total state-space evolves deterministically, subjective deliberation and outcome differentiation are still structurally real within each branch - enough to preserve the experiential grammar of choice, if not libertarian freedom.[/quote]
Agree with that, and even more, since your statement seems confined to MWI assumptions, but the conclusion is interpretation independent.
As for my opinion of Libertarian free will, that's just a term describing external agency, with no demonstration of any greater freedom than internal agency. Coming down with Rabies is an example of Libertarian free will. The agency is suddenly something other than yours, and Rabies (the external agent) now has the free will instead of you, and it compels you to bite people, and then Rabies becomes responsible for those assaults, not you.
Look what you are saying. It can just be turned around. Not getting married was the mistaken choice which shouldn't have been made.
Getting married is like pulling the trigger. One can put off that choice indefinitely, but once done, it's done.
I used it as a counter for your assertion of 'certainty of success', and 'minimize risk'. Getting married is a risk (something you assert to never be the best option), even ones that seem a very good match. Not getting married is usually not the best option. Sure, it is for some people. I have 3 kids, and only one marriage is expected, thus countering my 'usually' assertion.
The point being that action requires choice, and choice restricts the person's freedom to select all the other possibilities.
One never had freedom to select multiple options. Sure, you can have both vanilla and chocolate, but that's just a single third option. There's no having cake and eating it, so to speak. You have choice because you can select any valid option, but you can't choose X and also not X.
Somehow I'm guessing you meant something else by that comment, but I cannot figure out what else it might mean.
If a hamburger is the only thing the person knows to be food, then "looking for food" is a significant restriction.
OK, but I don't know how this became a discussion about ignorance of what is food. The comment was in response to your assertion of "the first principle is that nonaction maintains freedom", and my example of nonaction (and not ignorance) will cause among other things starvation, which will likely curtail freedom.
Metaphysician UndercoverOctober 22, 2025 at 02:17#10201850 likes
Getting married is like pulling the trigger. One can put off that choice indefinitely, but once done, it's done.
I used it as a counter for your assertion of 'certainty of success', and 'minimize risk'. Getting married is a risk (something you assert to never be the best option), even ones that seem a very good match. Not getting married is usually not the best option. Sure, it is for some people. I have 3 kids, and only one marriage is expected, thus countering my 'usually' assertion.
I think this is a false example. The option is usually whether or not to marry a specific person, not whether or not to get married in general. And, if you're not certain about the person, you're probably not in love, and you should not go ahead at that time. And if the question is whether or not to get married in general, you should not go ahead with that, until you are certain that it is the right thing.
The difference between the way you and I are looking at this, is that you are making some kind of 'objective' statement "getting married is a risk", and from that you are saying that risk is good. But from that 'objective' perspective, every choice is a risk, so of course risk must be good or else all choices would be bad. But that's not what I am talking about. I am talking about looking from the perspective of the person making the choice. And from that perspective, if the act is risky it's better for the person to wait until they have more confidence. Often the stakes are very low, and risk is simply not taken into consideration. But as the stakes get higher, considering the risk gets more and more important.
One never had freedom to select multiple options. Sure, you can have both vanilla and chocolate, but that's just a single third option. There's no having cake and eating it, so to speak. You have choice because you can select any valid option, but you can't choose X and also not X.
Sorry, I didn't make myself clear. I should have said freedom to select from all the other possibilities. So for example if there is twenty options, then the person has the freedom to select from twenty options. However, once the choice is made you restrict your freedom to select the other nineteen. That's what I meant, making a choice restricts your freedom. If you have the freedom to choose X or not X, then choosing X restricts your freedom to choose not X. Making a choice always restricts one's freedom.
OK, but I don't know how this became a discussion about ignorance of what is food. The comment was in response to your assertion of "the first principle is that nonaction maintains freedom", and my example of nonaction (and not ignorance) will cause among other things starvation, which will likely curtail freedom.
Your conclusion is based on the assumption that "starvation will likely curtail freedom". Those who believe that being chained to the body is a restriction to the soul would argue otherwise. So that is just a reflection of your metaphysical preference. My principle, that non-action maintains freedom is based in the logic explained above.
Truth SeekerOctober 22, 2025 at 12:13#10202460 likes
Reply to noAxioms Thank you for your thoughtful and detailed reply. I appreciate your clarifications - especially on terminology.
When I said the universal state vector differentiates, I didnt mean that it splits or collapses in any literal sense. I agree that the universal wave function evolves unitarily. What I meant is that decoherence continuously factorizes the total state into dynamically autonomous subspaces. The evolution is singular, but its structure becomes increasingly partitioned as interference terms vanish. In that descriptive sense, decoherence is ontologically generative - it produces new relational structure within the universal state, even if not new worlds as discrete entities.
Youre right that Everett himself didnt speak of sharply defined branches, and I share your caution about reifying them. Still, decoherence does create stable quasi-classical sectors whose internal histories no longer interfere. Calling them branches is shorthand for these dynamically independent histories. So when I said that an event that leaves no macroscopic trace still differentiates the overall state, I meant that every quantum fluctuation alters the total wave functions structure, even if those alterations remain forever unamplified from our classical perspective.
I also agree that quantum mechanics is not observer-dependent in the Wigner sense - nothing special happens because a conscious agent looks. My use of observer was relational, not Cartesian: any subsystem that records or correlates information functions as an observer relative to another. Within that relational framework, phenomenological perspectives arise naturally from entanglement structure, not metaphysical privilege.
Regarding freedom and responsibility: yes, phenomenology remains intact. Even if the total evolution is deterministic, each branch still contains agents whose deliberative architectures causally mediate outcomes within that branch. That structure grounds a compatibilist sense of agency: one can be determined and yet meaningfully responsible insofar as choices flow from ones own evaluative processes. Libertarian freedom, by contrast, would require causal independence from ones own nature - an incoherent notion. In your rabies analogy, the external pathogen literally overrides the persons cognitive structure, which is why we no longer ascribe responsibility. The contrast actually illustrates compatibilism rather than libertarianism.
Stepping back, the parallel between branching and agency seems telling: both involve emergent autonomy within an underlying deterministic totality. The global states evolution may be seamless, yet locally it yields distinct, causally closed structures - worlds in one case, deliberating agents in the other. In both, the differentiation is real enough to sustain the lived grammar of choice, even if metaphysical freedom never enters the picture.
In my own framework - the GENE Causal Self Model - I interpret such autonomy through the interplay of Genes, Environments, Nutrients, and Experiences. Each agents decisions are determined by the evolving configuration of these factors, yet within that causal web, reflective self-organization still emerges. Much like decoherent branches of the wave function, selves are dynamically distinct yet law-governed substructures of a single evolving whole.
What I meant is that decoherence continuously factorizes the total state into dynamically autonomous subspaces.
Careful. It factorizes the measured state into dynamically autonomous subspaces. That means that only the systems that have measured the decohered state become entangled with it, thus becoming 'factorized' along with it. There's no universe with a dead cat in it and another with a live one. There's just the unopened box and (relative to the lab) a cat in superposition of these states. The box prevents the 'split' from decohering any further.
This is a hypothetical example. Preventing any measurement like that is essentially impossible. Sure, they've done it for barely visible objects under conditions that would kill any lifeform, and only for nanoseconds, but Schrodinger's box has actually been done. They used a tuning fork instead of a cat.
In that descriptive sense, decoherence is ontologically generative - it produces new relational structure within the universal state, even if not new worlds as discrete entities.
Yes, This is closer to my relational preference in interpretations. I use a relational definition of ontology, as opposed to a realist one like MWI does.
Youre right that Everett himself didnt speak of sharply defined branches,
Yea, it was DeWitt who first did that, and then backed off somewhat from that description.
My use of observer was relational, not Cartesian
Fine. Just making sure. I tend to use the term 'measurement' instead of 'observation', but even that term has overtones of say intent. 'Interaction'?
Within that relational framework, phenomenological perspectives arise naturally from entanglement structure, not metaphysical privilege.
There are so many that I consider to be competent thinkers that presume that metaphysical privilege.
Libertarian freedom, by contrast, would require causal independence from ones own nature
I wouldn't say that since 'one's own nature' becomes this 2nd metaphysical causal process, and thus not intedependence of one's own nature. Independence of one's physical nature perhaps, but is there even a physical nature if that kind of thing is how it all works?
- an incoherent notion. In your rabies analogy, the external pathogen literally overrides the persons cognitive structure, which is why we no longer ascribe responsibility.
Isn't that exactly what the dualists suggest is going on? Of course, a dualist with rabies would have the physical effected, and somehow the mental component also affected, at least rendered less efficacious. Tri-ism? Three agents (physical, mental, and pathogen) all fighting for control.
I actually do report a form of it. I am occasionally afflicted with a form of epiphenomenalism where I am awake but cut off from most physical causality. I wake up from this condition, and only with an extreme mental effort can I push through my will an move something (preferably turn my head). It's called sleep paralysis, and the short of it is that your motor functions turn off when you sleep. If this mechanism is faulty, you sleepwalk. If it fails to turn on the juice when you wake up, it's sleep paralysis. I guess I don't have to worry too much about ever sleep walking.
Stepping back, the parallel between branching and agency seems telling: both involve emergent autonomy within an underlying deterministic totality. The global states evolution may be seamless, yet locally it yields distinct, causally closed structures - worlds in one case, deliberating agents in the other.
Agree up to here.
In both, the differentiation is real enough to sustain the lived grammar of choice, even if metaphysical freedom never enters the picture.
I don't think human choice has anything to do with differentiation since under any other interpretation where there isn't the kind of differentiation you get under MWI, the exact same choices and responsibility results. The only difference is that there are not other worlds split of sufficiently long ago that those tiny difference have grown into macroscopic difference large enough to cause different choices to be made, and my choice and responsibility has nothing to do with what those other versions are choosing.
I think this is a false example. The option is usually whether or not to marry a specific person, not whether or not to get married in general.
I'm not talking about a choice to not get married. I'm talking about making a choice to commit to marriage now (propose, or accept a proposal), coupled with the subsequent actual getting married, which is the trigger being pulled: can't hypothetically undo that. Doing so would be presumably to one person.
Deciding to get married in general (with perhaps no specific prospect currently in mind) is not like pulling the trigger since one can always change one's mind about such a decision.
you should not go ahead with that, until you are certain that it is the right thing.
Few, arguably none, are ever certain of it being the correct choice. Plenty of people have attested to be certain about it, only to regret the decision later on. I'm lucky. Married over 40 years now. All my siblings are on spouse #2. The one that waited the longest to be 'most certain' ended in cheating (both parties) and divorce.
The difference between the way you and I are looking at this, is that you are making some kind of 'objective' statement "getting married is a risk", and from that you are saying that risk is good.
There's overtones of 'marriage is good' there, which I don't agree is always true. But each statement in isolation, yes I'm saying that. I have better examples of 'risk is good'. Marriage is my example of a decision of a trigger pull, something you can't undo.
I am talking about looking from the perspective of the person making the choice. And from that perspective, if the act is risky it's better for the person to wait until they have more confidence.
Disagree, for reasons and examples I've already posted. There are times when risk is high, but would likely get higher with time, and so confidence is likely to drop if you wait.
Take saving people from a burning building. You can risk your life and charge in there and grab the baby, or you can wait until the fire trucks get the fire more under control so your safety is more assured. That's a hard decision, and there are cases where each option is the best one.
So for example if there is twenty options, then the person has the freedom to select from twenty options.
Great. Agree. There are those that say that 19 of those options are not available for selection because it is the 20th you want, even if the other 19 are close contenders.
However, once the choice is made you restrict your freedom to select the other nineteen.
Under a pull-trigger sort of situation, yes. In other cases, one can change one's mind. We've been getting into the nitty-gritty about this latter case: "Was a decision really made if the option to change your mind is still open?".
The former restricts one's freedom. The latter does as well, but not nearly as much.
If you have the freedom to choose X or not X, then choosing X restricts your freedom to choose not X. Making a choice always restricts one's freedom.
Sometimes, per the above.
Anyway, I stand more clarified about your statement of making a choice curtailing freedom.
Truth SeekerOctober 23, 2025 at 16:21#10204590 likes
Reply to noAxioms Thank you for your detailed reply. I think were largely aligned, though we diverge on a few interpretive nuances.
On factorization, I accept your refinement: decoherence doesnt magically bifurcate the universal state into sealed compartments but rather entangles subsystems such that coherence between them becomes practically lost. When I said continuously factorizes the total state, I meant this relational entanglement structure - the effective tensor-product decomposition that yields dynamically autonomous components relative to the measurement context. So yes, the split is local and conditional, not global. I like your phrasing that only the systems that have measured the decohered state become entangled with it. Thats a good corrective to the loose Everettian imagery.
I share your relational preference over full-blown realism. My ontologically generative phrasing was intended in that same spirit: the ontology is not a collection of separate universes but a web of ever-evolving relational configurations. The structure of relations changes - new entanglement correlations come into being - even though the global amplitude distribution remains one evolving unity. So perhaps structurally generative would be the better expression.
Regarding observer versus interaction, I agree completely. I used observer phenomenologically, but interaction avoids the mentalistic overtones. Im wary of language that suggests intent or consciousness as a special causal category; it risks re-smuggling the old metaphysical privilege that quantum theory works so hard to dissolve.
On free will, I think we converge on compatibilism but may use slightly different vocabularies. I take your point that ones own nature could itself be construed as a second metaphysical causal chain, but I meant it more modestly: the organisms integrated causal structure - its neural and psychological architecture - as distinct from an external intruder like the rabies virus. The point is not that one becomes independent of causality, but that causal efficacy remains internal to the systems evaluative dynamics. Thats why the rabies example marks the boundary between responsibility and compulsion. Dualists, as you say, would complicate that further, perhaps imagining the pathogen interfering with both the physical and the mental tracks, but I see that as multiplying mysteries rather than explaining anything.
Your description of sleep paralysis is fascinating - its a vivid phenomenological example of partial causal decoupling: consciousness active, motor output suppressed. From a naturalistic angle, it actually illustrates how finely tuned the causal layers of agency are: when one channel is interrupted, agency becomes experiential but not performative. Its a transient epiphenomenal pocket, not a metaphysical clue, but I can see why it feels uncanny.
As for your final point - that human choice doesnt depend on branching - I fully agree. The experiential grammar of choice would be the same in any interpretation, whether Everettian, Bohmian, or GRW. My comparison between branching and agency was metaphorical: both involve local differentiation within a globally deterministic process. The analogy isnt meant to make agency depend on branching, only to highlight the structural parallel between emergent autonomy in physics and in psychology.
In that sense, I see compatibilist freedom and relational quantum ontology as reflections of the same deeper pattern: causal closure at the global level, emergent quasi-autonomy at the local. In my GENE Causal Self Model, those quasi-autonomous patterns are constituted by the interaction of Genes, Environments, Nutrients, and Experiences - a biological analogue to decoherences relational structure. Both describe complex systems that remain causally determined yet exhibit self-organizing agency through internal feedback loops. Determinism and autonomy, far from being opposites, are two perspectives on the same relational process.
Metaphysician UndercoverOctober 25, 2025 at 01:12#10208020 likes
Disagree, for reasons and examples I've already posted. There are times when risk is high, but would likely get higher with time, and so confidence is likely to drop if you wait.
Take saving people from a burning building. You can risk your life and charge in there and grab the baby, or you can wait until the fire trucks get the fire more under control so your safety is more assured. That's a hard decision, and there are cases where each option is the best one.
I admit, I could never frame "risk" with a definition which would make it universally bad. But in thinking about it I see that there is quite a number of different ways to relate to risk. There is risk of failure. There is risk that even with success in obtaining the goal, it wasn't the best goal. There is also risk that proceeding toward one goal will produce failure relative to another. So many different types of risk.
Comments (227)
What's your answer?
This is a good vehicle into the underlying question, do we ever choose our actions? Are we agents in our own story? Is there free will? Are we capable of halting the forces of necessity to deliberately influence our self-same lives?
I have to say yes because otherwise, I am not writing this post. If the forces of nature have led me to spell the word led without an a (as in lead, both of which follow the laws of grammar), and if I should remove me from the equations of this sentence, it seems to me I wouldnt have ever noticed a difference between nature and myself in the first place and would never have seen the choice between led and lead.
If all of science was completed and reported to everyone as from God, and this report said all moves by determined necessity and there are no choices I would still have to choose to believe this, or not, before the motion of this thread could go about its merry way.
Depends on several factors. Ignoring choice of deterministic interpretation of things or otherwise, in what way would this entity that makes a different choice in the past be you, or relative to what would that choice be 'different'? What ties you (that choses vanilla) to the possible T-S that choses chocolate?
I didn't vote because the question was vaguely worded.
Quoting Fire OlogistThis also depends on definitions, but you seem to be using one that doesn't distinguish choice from free choice, rendering the adjective meaningless.
If I cannot make a different choice then there is no choice. A choice, by definition, has to involve multiple variables and a deliberative agent whose action influences the outcome among those variables. Take away the agent, and there are no longer any variables identifiable only in a deliberating agent; Take away the variables and there is no choice. So choice involves both a deliberative (free reflecting) agent, and variables.
How else can we define the moving parts of a choice? Maybe I have no choice but to finish this paragraph with the word not. Maybe the last word of this post has been predicable for ten thousand years. But it seems to me it is more likely a consequence of me and my free choices, that could go any way I am capable of bringing to effect. Maybe not.
Past cannot be changed, so you couldn't have made different choices for the past. But you are free to make choices for now and future.
Quoting Fire Ologist
For example, a chess program has countless variables to ponder (at some length), and has (is) a deliberate agent whose action influences the outcome. If there was no chess program, the action would not be taken, so the influence is clearly there.
But...
given 20 identical programs with the exact same initial state, each will typically do the exact same thing.
They have choice, but not free choice since they can consider, but not actually make a different move. Your assertion presumes not choice, but free choice, which has a different definition (the one the OP uses).
Now take Schrodinger's cat (and a presumption of say Copenhagen interpretation). Given 20 identical cats in boxes with the exact same initial state, about half will die and half not. The cat thus has free choice (could have done otherwise), but sadly has no actual choice (no deliberate agency in the outcome). See the difference? One can have neither, both, or one but not the other.
You seem to be attempting to combine the two into one, with no distinction between the cases, in which case choice and free choice do not mean different things.
The OP (where's he gone?) seems to be leveraging the 'could have done otherwise' definition, not the definition you give, a 'deliberate selection from multiple options'.
I assure you otherwise. Too many people equate 'deterministic' with 'predictable'. The former is interpretation dependent (metaphysics), and the latter is very much known, and is part of fundamental theory.
Quoting Corvus
This presumes an ontology where events are sorted into past, present, and future. Fine and dandy, but sans an empirical difference, I don't see the point.
But that's one version of determinism: All events share the same ontology, which means the Corvus in 2026 is no more capable of making a 'change' (as the word is used above) as the Corvus in 2020.
The usage of 'change' also implies that some future event is one thing, but later that same event is a different thing. That syntactically makes no sense. It isn't change if it was never something different.
I never think we can clarify a human behavior at issue, like choosing, by analogizing this behavior with some other type of entitys behavior (like a chess program). We try to make black and white clarity by mixing gray with gray.
I dont see any substantial distinction between a choice and a free choice.
In your example of what the computer is doing before it makes a move, why call that a choice at all? It is operating on inputs to determine the only move it must make. It is not choosing, but calculating. You said yourself its next move is determined just as it is for the other 19 identical programs. There is no agent, so there are no variables, so there is no choice.
A really good chess player is effectively calculating just as well, and his or her moves may not be choices either.
I see calling what the program does choosing as personifying the program. And we dont yet know what choosing is or if we ever get to choose ourselves, so how are we to judge the program properly anyway?
Can you clarify the difference between a choice and a free choice, and deterministic mo choice using only human behavior as an example?
There are only three types of time perceptions we have. Past, Present and Future.
Past come from the memory i.e. remembering the events in the past. Present comes from our live perception happening now with consciousness for the now. Future comes from our imagination.
If you lost all your memories, then you don't have the past. If you can't imagine, then you don't have any ideas about the future. If you are not conscious, you don't have the present, past or future.
You can only make choices for now. You could also plan to make choices for your future using your imagination and thoughts.
Unless the universe (of determinant forces and constraints on one) changes too, I don't think so.
Simple application of modality. Time perceptions and quantum multiple universes are irrelevant.
I don't think modal logic has any metaphysical import though. It's just about the way we think.
Yea.
Did you enjoy that movie last night?
That can be answered with yes or no, depending on how you look at it.
Can I take you out on a date Frank?
That can be answered with yes or no, depending on how you look at it.
Would you like a bit of sloppy toppy Frank?
That can be answered with yes or no, depending on how you look at it.
Are you in pain Frank?
That can be answered with yes or no, depending on how you look at it.
Yes. I think it's part of having Asperger's that I notice all the ways a question can be looked at.
Why not look at all the possible answers?
Is the question as expressed here any different from the standard questions about free will and determinism?
Yes, I agree with you on this. If we're right, it seems to me the whole question of free will vs. determinism becomes trivial, pointless.
I noticed, which is why you couldn't tell apart those two very different definitions of choice. I do see a substantial distinction, and so the word 'free' becomes meaningful, and not just redundant.
Because it met your definition of it. I explained how when I brought up the example.
No, there are many moves that it can make, and it is not compelled to choose any particular one. It evaluates each in turn and selects what it feels is a better one, all the same steps that a person does.The action (the evaluation and the selection) influences the outcome, just as your definition requires. If the choice were compelled, the program would not have influence over the outcome and would thus be unnecessary and the move would make itself, and those chess programs would be ever so much faster, and then it would not meet your definition.
False dichotomy. Calculating (pondering, whatever) is part of the process leading to the eventual choice. It is not this or that, but rather this that leads to that.
Computers tend to work best with deterministic components, even in the face of a possible non-deterministic physics. There is no 'select randomly' instruction such as is utilized by the cat in my example above. Human physiology is similar in this respect. There seems to be no components that amplify randomness or otherwise produce output that is not a function of prior state.
Ooh, anthropomorphism again. Apparently many words only apply to humans and not anything else when doing the exact same thing. The racists used the same tactic to imply that people not 'them' were inferior.
A chess program makes its own moves, so it very much is the agent in those selections.
Are we changing the definition again? Does a bad chess player make some sort of actual choice when the good one has no agency or something? Your definition wording doesn't seem to support that.
Well choice is as you define it: The thing in question needs to influence the outcome (be part of, (be the primary) cause of it, given the relevant variables in the input state.
Free choice (as typically defined) means that the primary cause of the outcome did not follow from physical prior state. There is way more than one definition of free choice, but that's a common one, and it is quite distinct from your definition.
The OP doesn't mention the word 'free' at all, but does mention "could have done otherwise" which is an informal alternate definition of it.
Quoting CorvusActually it is impossible to perceive the present. You speak of the fairly immediate past, which is what is typically in our active perception at any given time.
Choosing is a process, and thus cannot happen in an instant, so choosing is spread out over some interval of time regardless of whether you assign unequal ontology to those moments or not.
Quoting 180 Proof
Under any nondeterminist interpretation, one 'could have chosen differently', or even might not have faced the choice at all. It also works under some fully deterministic interpretations like MWI where all possible choices are made in some world.
The key seems to come down to the word 'anyone'. Is that person in some other world that chooses otherwise the same person as you? The answer to that is yes if you're the same person you were last week (different state of course), and no if there is no persistent identity, in which case it is hard to argue that anything makes a choice at all.
Quoting T Clark
1) Determinism has little to do with free will since the typical definition of free will doesn't become free if randomness is the case instead of determinism. Determinism also has at least 4 different definitions, so that is also unclear.
FW seems to be central to the dualist argument because they way choices to be made by a supernatural agent despite the fact that neither deterministic nor random physics supports that.
Quoting flannel jesus
Not sure what sloppy toppy is, but it sounds like a bonus they put on your hot chocolate.
OK, I looked it up. Way off.
I don't see why my only choices are determinism, randomness, or supernatural agency. I think a better way to think of it is that the real world is run by randomness constrained by deterministic processes. I'm not sure what that does for free will.
Well, yes. Same with modality.
We can think about how things might have been different. That's what "could" does in "Could anyone have made a different choice in the past than the ones they made?"
I am not talking about changing the past. What determines who chooses what? If the choices are determined by genes, environments, nutrients and experiences, are the choices free? If I had the genes of a banana tree instead of my genes, could I have typed these words? I don't think so.
What I am exploring here is whether our choices are inevitable or not. Are we free agents or are our choices determined by variables such as genes, environments, nutrients, and experiences?
You're saying free will and determinism both come down to the way we think rather than metaphysics? I agree.
I think you are right.
How do you know this?
Quoting 180 Proof
Counterfactuals are recondite. You cant say if this didnt happen then that would have happened because you dont know everything that might have happened.
Pratchett, Terry. Lords And Ladies: (Discworld Novel 14) (Discworld series) (pp. 162-163). Transworld. Kindle Edition.
Oh! From one point of view, if I had become a criminal, the resulting person wouldn't be me. My identity is made up of bits of my history. If I'd had a different history, I'd be a different person, maybe closely kin to me, like a cousin. Therefore I can't have a different history.
Or we could just look at it via modal logic. That's just looking at alternatives, nothing metaphysical.
He's right. If you look at the universe as a monolith where everything is interrelated, determinism is the outcome.
Know it?
It's about making sense form your question, working out wha tit is you asked.
Quoting Truth Seeker
We can consider how things would have been different if you had chose not to post your OP. You know this, and can readily bring to mind how things would be if you had gone for a walk rather than posting on the forums.
And that is all you are asking.
Unless you wanted to know if the universe were deterministic, in the way 180 seems to suppose. But then, what would that mean? That if we rolled the universe back to how it was before your post, and set it in motion again, would things always turn out exactly the same? But we know that the sort of infinite precision that is suggested here is not physically possible, from Heisenberg. Things would proceed differently.
That's not what the physics says, if that is what you are asking.
Quoting frank
Then who became the criminal? "I" is a rigid designation, picking you out in every possible world, including those in which your nefarious self comes to the fore.
That's were Pratchet enters the equation.
I'll go over the physics again, becasue I think it a point worth making.
The universe is not deterministic in the way Newtonian physics suggested. It's not that we could measure the position of everything in the universe to any arbitrary level of precession. If we measure the momentum of an object to a greater degree of precession, we loose precession in the measurement of it's position. We can't have both.
Supose we take the universe back to before did the OP, and ask, if we did it again, would everything happen in the exact same way? And here we might be asking one of two different things. If you are asking us to take the universe back to the exact same state as it was before the OP, and set it rolling again, then physics says that the notion of "the exact same state" does not make sense, because there can be no such measurement of the state of the universe. But if you are imagining not a physical state but a modal state, the universe just as it was, then of course the exact same thing would happen again... becasue that is what you are supposing in your modal ruminations.
Yep. And the answer (at least in part) is to consider in a bit more detail what you are asking. You can consider how things would have been had you not posted the OP - you would not be reading this post, for one, and might be doing something much more gratifying. In that sense, of course you might have done otherwise than you actually did.
And then there is consideration of what you might do next. Will you finish reading this paragraph, or go do something else? You might do either, but you will have to wait to find out which you actually do. And only one or the other will actually occur; you can't both read this paragraph to the end and not read it to the end. Is it inevitable that you read this far? Well, my prose has kept you enthralled, I suppose, since here you are.
But you might have done otherwise.
:grin: Yes, I'm aware that I'm giving voice to the problem that rigid designation was supposed to solve.
Your identity is your history. If you'd had a different history, you'd be a different person. It's true. Rigid designation only makes sense of certain turns of phrase, it doesn't cover all that we believe about identity.
Cool. Then this:
Quoting frank
is a tautology, because you are now identifying yourself as your history, not as frank. All you are saying is that the person who did not become a criminal did not become a criminal.
Well, I'm saying the person who didn't become a criminal, couldn't have become a criminal. It's more than a tautology, although I'll grant, not much more.
But I didn't do otherwise. Is it inevitable that I posted the original post and read your last reply and typed these words?
Was that inevitable? Well, what does 'inevitable" do? It's origin is "not avoidable", and now that you have read that paragraph it is unavoidable that you read it. But you still might not have read it, and this thread might then be shorter.
So the answer to "Could anyone have made a different choice in the past than the ones they made?" is that yes, it makes sense to consider how things might have been.
Quoting Truth Seeker
Quoting Truth SeekerDepends on one's definition of 'free'. A compatibilist would say yes even if physics is fully deterministic, but a compatibilist might have a completely different definition of 'free' than somebody wanting to rationalize a different view.
A better definition is 'not compelled by something not you'. Nothing in a deterministic universe compels a different decision than the one you want. Hence compatibilism.
OK, your second quote there implies that 'free' means at least "not determined by that list of variables", in which case probably not, but why in the world would you want that kind of 'free'? Sounds like a formula for horrible choice making.
Your genes influence your general makup (what you grew up to be), but are for the most part not consulted in any way for making a particular decision.
If you were conceived with banana genes, then you'd have grown up into a banana plant. But if your human genes were all suddenly switched into banana genes shortly before ordering ice cream, you'd probably pick the same flavor, and only later get sick and die because you are failing as a banana plant. Not a biologist, so I don't know how fast it would happen, but it would very much happen.
Quoting Truth SeekerTo me, that sounds like 'if nothing was different, then would anything different happen?'. What exactly is different when you say those words? You seem to have left nothing out. What is being swapped here?
Quoting Truth SeekerThis has to do with which interpretation of physics (if any of the known ones) happens to be the case. In some, yes, all inevitable.There are several definitions of 'determined' and several of them need to be not the case for the sort of 'free' that you seem to have in mind. Most non-deterministic interpretations are alternatively fundamentally random, which doesn't allow any more freedom than a non-random interpretation. Rolling dice is a very poor way to make decisions that matter, which is why there are no structures in human physiology that leverage natural randomness. And there very much would be such structures if there was useful information to be found in it. Evolution would not ignore any advantage like that.
Quoting T ClarkNo idea what that means.
Sure. If your genes were different, you might have acted differently. If your environment were different, you might not have had access to this web site. If you had skipped breakfast, you might have been too tiered to bother posting. That's not to say that even if your genes had been different, you may have acted in the very same way. If your environment had been different, you may have changed it so as to gain access to this site. Had you skipped breakfast, you might nevertheless have still made the OP.
"...they are determined" just means that identical choices would result in the same outcome. So yes, if they are determined, then identical choices would result from identical variables.
See how much how you ask the question sets up the answer you get?
I agree. How would I know with 100% certainty if they are determined or not?
There are two ways, both impractical to (currently) impossible. First one could predict with 100% accuracy, outcomes from detailed knowledge of the brainstate before the "decision" was made or second, if you could set up more than one example of identical brainstates then demonstrate that they always make the same "decision".
However, in my opinion, there are too many examples of "close enough" scenarios of the second situation resulting in wildly different outcomes to personally believe in Determinism.
Quoting noAxioms
The OP raises whether or not it's possible to 'change the past' of the actual world (i.e. retroactively making a choice different from the choice that already has been made); imo counterpart choices in 'parallel / possible worlds' are not relevant to the question at hand.
Quoting Banno
My reply to the OP is consistent with compatibilism not your strawman.
:cool:
Choice itself implies the act of choosing was made by the person and the person's free will.
Quoting Truth Seeker
Banana tree gene is irrelevant premise for your conclusion. It makes no sense at all. There are many other reasons why you typed the post, other than your genes. But most of all, it was your free will which typed your posts.
Quoting 180 Proof
If that is how you read it, well, no. The past is kinda fixed.
Quoting 180 Proof
If the universe is of determinant forces and constraints, then it is determinant.
So not seeing any disagreement here.
If I had the genes of a banana tree, instead of my human genes, I would have grown into a banana tree, provided I was in the appropriate environment and received the appropriate nutrients. Since no banana tree is sentient and types in English, it would have been impossible for me to post anything on this forum.
What do you mean by free will? My will is certainly not free from my genes, environments, nutrients and experiences. I think my will is both determined and constrained by my genes, environments, nutrients and experiences.
Of course they do. Free choice is not needed at all for that. Common misconception. It is only needed for external responsibility (like responsible to some entity not part of the causal physics), but it is not needed to be held responsible by say my society, which IS part of the universe.
Because it's not those variables that made the choice, it is how you process them into the chosen selection that matters.
Quoting 180 Proof
I didn't read it that way. No explicit mention of retrocausality, only the proposal that it might have possibly evolved differently from some given prior state. That answer is, as I said, a matter of interpretation. BTW, any non-local interpretation allows some retrocausality, but does not allow information to go back. So some occurrence might be a function of some event that has not yet happened (interpretation of delayed choice experiments), but a message cannot be sent to the past by such a mechanism, and to 'change the past' would seem to require the latter ability.
It is a different evolution of some same initial state. I find that relevant, but since that person in the other world is arguably not 'you', then 'you' didn't do the other thing. You can't both have chosen both vanilla and chocolate (twist is a third choice, not 'doing otherwise').
It's the variables (genes, environments from conception to the present, nutrients from conception to the present and experiences from the womb to the present) that determine my perceptions, thoughts, emotions, values, words and actions. For example, if I had the genes of a banana tree instead of my genes, I would never have been sentient and hence I would never have been able to think any thoughts. If aliens kidnapped me when I was a baby and placed on the surface of Venus, I would have died from the heat. If I was deprived of all nutrients when I was a zygote, I would never have lived long enough to become a human who can post messages online. If I never experienced learning the English language, I would not have been able to post in English on this forum. As you can see from my examples, my choices are the products of variables.
No humans have banana tree gene. What is the point of telling us that? It is irrelevant point, and there is no logical link for what you are claiming.
Quoting Truth Seeker
Your idea of free will doesn't have boundary or definition, and it is not a correct concept. "genes, environments, nutrients and experiences" are not relevant elements for having free will.
Well, that is a misunderstanding the concept free will, I am afraid. You have free will. If you didn't have free will, you would not have typed your posts. :nerd: I am sure that no one was forcing you to type your posts. You are typing your posts by your free will the now. And I am too.
I am quoting the Merriam-Webster dictionary: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/free%20will
"noun
1
: voluntary choice or decision
I do this of my own free will
2
: freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes or by divine intervention"
Our choices can be voluntary but they are not free from determinants and constraints.
Those are not related to philosophical idea of free will. Constraints and determinants are the properties of your own being. They are part of your essence.
Yes, they are. The second meaning of 'free will' is the "freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes". Our choices are never free from prior causes such as our genes, our environments from conception to the present, our nutrients from conception to the present and our experiences from the womb to the present. While we make voluntary choices, no one chooses their genes, their early environments, their early nutrients and their early experiences. As older children and adults we have limited choices about our environments, nutrients and experiences but even these limited choices are never free from the variables of genes, environments from conception to the present, nutrients from conception to the present and experiences from conception to the present.
Better example. Not sure what it illustrates, but at least it's not a contradiction. The point being made is still illusive. Your choices are a product of those variables, yes. It is also a product of your reasoning, which is the variable that makes you responsible for them and doesn't make the shadow responsible for depriving a plant of sunlight.
Concerning your poll and why I didn't vote:
Quoting Truth Seeker
Unclear question. Are you asking if determinism is the case, and therefore the choice made (I don't believe there is a 'the past' as distinct from 'not the past') is an inevitability of some initial state of the universe? Or are you perhaps asking if the agent that makes a different choice is still considered to be the same agent as yourself? Or asking something entirely different?
About definitions: I have proposed a small list of definitions of 'free choice' as distinct from choice that isn't free. I've also claimed at least 4 different kinds of determinism, but have not listed them in this topic. You've not clarified which ones are what you're talking about or not.
No one can clearly state what they are doing when they claim to make a choice - its a few thousand year old debate. So how can anyone say this yet to be determined thing called choosing is doing the exact same thing as anything else?
In order for the program to make a move, it needs to have been given its programming; there need be no agent inserted into the program so that the chess pieces move. Once the program moves a piece, if you deconstructed the cause of that move, you could all the code and never see any agent influenced anything.
Maybe the same is true for people. But then there is no such thing as choosing (because there is no agency).
Quoting noAxioms
Then you assert a dichotomy, a distinction, between calculating, which is a process before, and choice which would come after (eventually). So its not a false dichotomy by what you say. When a program is done calculating, it has no choice but to display the answer or make the move. Choice is something else than the calculations that might precede it.
Quoting noAxioms
Why? Just why?
Quoting noAxioms
I still dont see a distinction between what a choice is, and what a free choice is. If something is determined by a prior physical state, its determined, so it cant be the result of a choice.
Choice is a pickle. But if we have the ability to make a choice, we must be a free agent in some sense. Otherwise, we are playing word games to make ourselves think our choices (or programmatic choices) exist.
That is the question.
I have those genes, environments, etc.
So is it the same question to ask myself given all that has preceded me, would I do anything else besides type this post? Could I do anything else besides repeat your words would I not have typed your post ?
So since I am the same as me, does it help me to understand a moment when I choose? It doesnt. I still dont understand how I am free to choose, nor how these words here are determined. Neither are clear.
My current answer is that, somehow, our brains kick out an awareness of awareness - we are once removed from ourselves (which gives us the concept of self to look back on). We can reflect. This happens outside of the normal causal chain, and builds a space for choice. This is such a fragile happening, environments and nutrients etc are suspended with it, and so our choice comes from this new space outside of ourselves (from nowhere). So we build the free agent we are in the act of asserting a choice in the causal chain. We are not free to choose until we just choose.
Am I making sense? To you? Because Im barely making sense to me.
When you say making choices, it necessitates options. In other words, you could have made choices because there were options or alternative decisions.
All the things you come up with as determinants and the prior causes don't allow you to have options. Therefore they are irrelevant for making choices.
Genes, environments and nutrients are not philosophical concepts. They are the concepts in Genetics, Sociology and Biology, which has nothing to do with philosophical ideas.
I guess I was looking for clarification about where the OP wanted to go with the question. That's why I asked him what his thoughts were.
What are your thoughts?
Genes, environments, nutrients and experiences are variables which determine and constrain our choices. They are real and their effects on our choices are real.
We make voluntary choices (e.g. my choice to post on this forum was voluntary) but we don't make choices that are free from determinants and constraints (e.g. my choice to post on this forum was both determined and constrained by my genes, environments, nutrients, and experiences). Do you understand what I have said?
Please tell me more about the 4 different kinds of determinism. Thank you.
Sure options are real. Have you ever been in a labyrinth?
I agree that options are real. I have been in mazes but not labyrinths.
Then you can always choose to do otherwise if you agree that options are real. The example of a maze is one. Think of a situation in which you have plenty of money but you are unsure about investing in the market. There are many examples in our lives in which we are unsure about the situations. This means that options in such situations are real so you can always choose to do otherwise.
I actually came up with six, but the first four are the important ones.
1) determinism.as not-dualism
I googled 'determinism' and got this: "all events in the universe are caused by prior events or natural laws ". This is probably the primary definition used when asserting a dichotomy between determinism vs dualistic free will, the latter being defined as choices made by supernatural causes. The word, used in this way, seems to be a synonym for naturalism.
This sort of free will is required to be held responsible by any entity not part of the natural universe (God). It is in no way required for internal responsibility (to say society).
There are a couple that come from science, two from quantum interpretations, which is deemed deterministic if it doesn't involve fundamental randomness or 'god rolling dice' as Einstein put it.
2) Bohmian mechanics:
This is a hard deterministic interpretation that says that the universe is in a defined state at a given time (few other interpretations accept that), and that subsequent states yield one inevitable result. The state of the entire universe matters including future states since retrocausality is not ruled out. It posits hidden variables to resolve conflicts.
3) MWI
Everett's postulate is that a closed system evolves according to the Schrodinger equation, which is a fully deterministic equation. Thing is, this results in all possibilities existing, so technically an agent makes every possible choice, not just one.
4) Block universe
This view says that all events share the same ontology and thus there is no sorting into ontologically distinct categories of past, present and future. If all events exist equally, there is no way the evolution of events could be otherwise, thus every state is an inevitability.
5) Classical physics
Classical physics (Newtons laws, basic mechanics) is fully deterministic since all the equations are time reversible. There is no randomness to it anywhere. This one can be discounted because it has been proved that our universe cannot be fundamentally classical.
Edit: Wrong! Classical physics has actually been shown nondeterministic, hence should not be on my list at all.
Norton's dome is a demonstration of the indeterminacy of Newtonian physics.
6) Omniscience:
If there is an omniscient entity, then what it knows is technically an inevitability or the entity wouldn't actually be omniscient. The church has a way to explain its way around their assertion of these seemingly contradictory concepts, perhaps very similar sort explanation that discounts your suggestion above that choices made via naturalistic processes constitutes them being constrained, something with which I do not agree.
Quoting Fire OlogistBut you're implying that it must be the case that it is fundamentally different when you say "I see calling what the program does choosing as personifying the program". That was what I was balking at. Empirically, if I cannot see my opponent, I cannot tell if I am playing a human or not (hence 'doing the exact same thing'), so the usage of the word 'choose' is appropriate in either case.
All true of yourself as well. Besides, most chess playing programs don't move physical pieces, and if they do, it's an add-on (a sort of assistant), not part of the process doing the choosing (wow, just like yourself again).
Ah, so 'agency' is another one of these anthropomorphic words that is forbidden to other entities. I cannot base logic on such biases.
Agree. The choice seems to be the result, possibly the output of the process, especially when it is cleanly delimited such as a chess move. A machine could choose not to display its choice of move, but that would be a bad choice since it would lose, so it seems optimal in most cases to make the move quickly. I can think of exceptions to that, but they're rare. A human is more likely to make that choice than a machine. I even witnessed exactly that a couple days ago.
Of course. You chose your definition that way.
Ah, you use the word 'free' despite the word having no distinct meaning to you. Why didn't you just say "we must be an agent'? You already put that word on the human-only list above. Now you say 'free agent' like that is distinct from just 'agent'. Be a little consistent if you're going to take this stance
A choice is what I call the result of choosing. Not any result of a calculating process. Choosing, if it exists, entails an agent who makes a free, deliberate selection among variables.
The program is not able to generate any other results, because it is not an agent capable of choosing which variable result to generate. There is always, only one move the program can make. So there is either no variables to select, or there is no agent. In the case of a program, there is no agent.
Quoting noAxioms
Or you didnt explain the distinction you see well enough for my thick skull.
The word choice, to me, entails a free agent presented with variables who acts by selecting one variable. So saying free choice is redundant, as freedom is a necessary component of any choice.
Above where you defined choice and then defined free choice differently, your definition of a mere choice was, to me, the definition of a deterministic outcome (so not a choice at all). You didnt define choice versus a free choice, you defined a deterministic outcome versus any choice (which always includes freedom, if choice exists at all.)
Do you think your view needs justification? If so, would you share it? If not, could you say why not?
Probably, but I think it's pretty intuitive. Most people have some kind of model of causality. Counterfactual statements like mine are just the basic idea of applying the same kind of causality but changing some of the preceding conditions.
You can apply - and verify - those kind of counterfactual statements to physics simulations. "This happened this time, but if counterfactually I changed the simulation to have this bit instead, this would have happened." You could make that statement about a physics simultaion, and then you can test it. And sometimes, those statements will be right! And sometimes wrong.
Of course we don't have the straight-forward ability to test our counterfactual statements about this world, but it doesn't seem remarkably controversial to me. In fact it's part of every-day speech for most people. "That wouldn't have happened if such-and-such".
So your view is primarily founded on common sense, right? The free will thesis reflects the way we commonly think and speak. I agree that it does. Although, the deterministic view does also. You mentioned that when you think of alternative histories, you're imagining a change in preceding conditions. Such a change would appear to imply a chain of preceding changes until we've basically replaced our universe with a different one. How do you address that?
One could also imagine a godlike figure reaching in and changing a couple individual things
The Thursday angle do much for the logic which says that if you'd done differently, the whole universe would have to be different from this one.
Or you could have a Sky Daddy intervene. :grin:
See, you can view the world as 2 things: the way the world operates, and the facts (or state) on which it does those operations. So you can reasonably say, if the state were counterfactually like X instead of what it was, then Y would have been the causal result. As long as "the way the world operates" is treated as a constant, then you can treat the state as a variable.
Yes. I get that. I was basically handing you Schopenhauer.
I am not convinced. I have been carrying out experiments on myself for many years to see how choices are made. Every single experiment showed me that the choices arise as a result of the interactions of four groups of variables. These groups of variables are genes, environments from conception to the present, nutrients from conception to the present and experiences from conception to the present. I am 99.(an infinite number of 9s)% certain that all our choices are inevitable.
I am 100% certain of the following:
1. I am conscious.
2. I am typing in English.
3. I am not all-knowing.
4. I am not all-powerful.
5. I change.
6. I know concepts e.g. what a square or circle or triangle is.
7. I know apparent facts about reality e.g. the Earth orbits the Sun, the Moon orbits the Earth.
8. I know how to walk, run, eat, drink, cook, shop, work, read, write, type, go to the toilet, cycle, swim, etc.
9. I can't do lots of things I really want to do e.g. go back in time and prevent all suffering, inequality, injustice, and deaths and make all living things forever happy.
10. I do some things even though I don't want to do them. Here are some things I have done, currently do or will do even though I don't want to do them:
1. Breathe
2. Eat
3. Drink
4. Sleep
5. Dream
7. Pee
8. Poo
9. Fart
10. Burp
11. Sneeze
12. Cough
13. Age
14. Get ill
15. Get injured
16. Sweat
17. Cry
18. Suffer
19. Snore
20. Think
21. Feel
22. Choose
23. Be conceived
24. Be born
25. Remember some events that I don't want to remember
26. Forget information that I want to remember
27. Die
I am almost 100% certain of the following:
1. I and all the other organisms currently alive will die. Every second brings all organisms closer to death.
2. My body, other organisms, the Earth and the Universe really exist and they are not part of a simulation or hallucination or dream or illusion.
3. Other organisms e.g. humans, cows, dogs, cats, chickens, pigs, lions, elephants, butterflies, whales, dolphins, etc. are sentient beings who feel pain.
4. Being a non-consumer is more ethical than being an autotroph, being an autotroph is more ethical than being a vegan/herbivore, being a vegan is more ethical than being a vegetarian, and being a vegetarian is more ethical than being an omnivore or carnivore.
5. Gods do not exist.
6. Souls do not exist.
7. Reincarnation does not happen.
8. Resurrection does not happen.
10. Organisms evolved and were not created by God or Gods.
11. 99.9% of all the species to evolve so far on Earth became extinct in 5 mass extinctions long before humans evolved.
12. Humans and other organisms make choices but they are not free from determinants and constraints. Our choices are determined and constrained by our genes, environments, nutrients, and experiences. The reason I have put this one in the almost certain category is that it is possible, albeit extremely unlikely, that bodies, genes, cells, stars, planets, moons, galaxies, universes do not actually exist. These things could be part of a simulation or dream or hallucination or illusion I am experiencing. It is impossible to know about this with 100% certainty. I could be a solipsistic soul experiencing the illusion of being in a human body on a planet in a universe or I could be a body without any soul - I don't know these things for sure, hence I am an agnostic. There are many hypotheses that can't be tested e.g. simulation hypothesis, illusion hypothesis, dream hypothesis, hallucination hypothesis, solipsism hypothesis, philosophical zombie hypothesis, panpsychism hypothesis, deism hypothesis, theism hypothesis, pantheism hypothesis, panentheism hypothesis, etc. Just because a hypothesis can't be tested it does not mean it is true or false. It just means that it is currently untestable.
What are your thoughts about the above thoughts of mine?
... and also not free of consequences. :100:
I agree. Thank you.
Only sometimes, but not the important times. There are chaotic systems like the weather. One tiny quantum event can (will) cascade into completely different weather in a couple months, (popularly known as the butterfly effect) so the history of the world and human decisions is significantly due to these quantum fluctuations. In other words, given a non-derministic interpretation of quantum mechanics, a person's decision is anything but inevitable from a given prior state. There's a significant list of non-deterministic interpretations. Are you so sure (without evidence) that they're all wrong?
Anyway, it's still pretty irrelevant since that sort of indeterminism doesn't yield free will. Making truly random decisions is not a way to make better decisions, which is why mental processes do not leverage that tool.
Quoting Fire OlogistNeither are you. Only one choice can be made, free will or not.
Choice: Having multiple options available and using a natural process to select among them.
Free Choice: Having multiple options available and using a supernatural process to select among them.
It kind of comes down to your beliefs concerning the nature of your process. I have no idea why the latter renders one responsible for the choice made and the former does not. That makes no sense at all to me. It just sounds better. "Hey, the one is called 'free', so I must have it, right? Right??". The other one sounds compelled to me, despite the opposite being the case. The former is the thing in question making its own choices and the latter involves the thing being compelled by a demon that has possessed the entity, overriding what it would have otherwise chosen. That gives the demon free choice, but it takes it away from that which it has possessed.
I generally agree with most of what flannel jesus says. He knows how to apply physics to philosophical issues.
Quoting flannel jesus
I think he means that he is essentially parroting the teachings of Schopenhauer in his reply. I wouldn't know, I don't know the teachings of almost any of the well known philosophers. The vast majority of them do not know how to apply physics to philosophical issues, even those that were around during the 20th century when so much changed.
He wrote an essay on determinism. It won a prize. It shows how that determinism is common sense just as much as free will is.
I'm not going to repeat it though. :grin:
I agree with him as well. He didn't use any physics though.
I say the former. Either because that is the correct answer, or the hideously complex interactions of particles and structures taking place within my brain, which is really all anything amounts to, regardless of words like consciousness, perception, and memory, can and do work out to only that one possible resolution, every time I consider the question.
The two alternative that you are considering, one that seems to leave open alternative opportunities for choice, and the other one that portrays those choices as being pre-determined by antecedent conditions and neural events, seem not to be alternatives at all. They seem to be two compatible viewpoints, or stances, on the same decision point.
The first one is an agential stance taken by the agent themselves who are contemplating some range of opportunities.
The second one is the stance of an external observer who is singularly well informed about microscopic details of the situation but who isn't concerned with evaluating the range of opportunities for actions in terms of desirability of practical rationality.
From this spectatorial stance, it may look like only one option was predetermined but no explanation as to why it is an action of that particular kind that had to take place is in view. From the agential perspective, the sort of action that took place is intelligible in light of the agent's aims, beliefs and reasons. From this stance, the specific path that was chosen among a range of open paths was chosen by the agent, and not by external pressures and/or "internal" (i.e. neural) circumstances. The latter sorts of factors are better seen as impediments, to and/or enabling conditions of, the agent's ability to make rational decisions.
I don't know the answer to that, and I doubt whether the question is even decidable in principle, because regardless of whether the macroworld is subject to randomness to a sufficient degree to make randomness operative at the macro level, knowing the answer would seem to depend on us experiencing a counterfactual reality, which is impossible in principle since anything we experience cannot rightly be thought to be a counterfactual.
They could be thought of the qualities of your being. They are not direct effects and causes for your choices. Extending the effects and causes to your general qualities of being is committing the fallacy of relevance.
I think an interesting question is, where does quantum randomness come from? There are a few interesting options, but one option in particular I personally really struggle with.
With many worlds, the randomness is actually only apparent randomness, an inevitable subjective experience but not random at all from a meta perspective.
Pilot Wave theory says there's no randomness, the conditions are there which determine any quantum result (maybe retrocausally).
Random-collapse says neither of the above are the right way to conceptualise the randomness, but in this way there are still two possibilities:
1. Non-local causal reason for why this random result was observed instead of that other random possibility. Imagine a universal random number generator that can affect quantum particles non locally.
2. Genuinely no reason at all. Literally no reason whatsoever why one random thing was observed instead of another. True ontological randomness.
I can't really wrap my head around 2. A lot of people go for #2 but, to me, literally any other possibility seems more comprehensible.
Obviously the universe just does what it does, with no concern for what I find comprehensible, so I could easily be wrong. If #2 is reality then I just don't comprehend reality. But damn, I really don't think it's #2. I'm with Einstein: things don't happen for no reason.
When it comes to a situation, you are either sure or unsure. This is a valid dichotomy. You do what you want to do if you are sure. But what about when you are unsure? I think we can agree that we all experience a sense of uncertainty in a situation, as in the maze example. That is when we say we are unsure in a situation. The important question is how could we possibly be uncertain if matter is a deterministic thing. In other words, how the sense of uncertainty is created in the brain considering that the brain is made of matter. This is something that I am currently thinking about and I believe no one has a clear answer to it.
I don't understand why there's a problem to think about at all. Our brain doesn't have direct access to all the knowledge of the world. Our brains build models of how we think the world is, based on limited information, and sometimes those models aren't actually close to how the world is.
How are thoughts created in the brain? What is the source of the information and how the information could be processed in the brain? All we know is that there is motion of matter and change in the electromagnetic field in the brain. Without these, I am sure we can tell that no thought is possible. You have certain thoughts when you are unsure in a situation, for example when you are in a maze though. The question of how we could possibly have a sense of uncertainty when the motion of matter and electromagnetic field are deterministic is then valid.
What do you mean by map and territory?
By territory, I think you mean matter and forces, and by representation, you mean thought. However, that does not answer my question. How could we have a single thought, knowing that all that exists is matter and forces?
I don't know enough about it to have an opinion about it. Please tell me more about how quantum events affect the weather. Is there a book you can recommend so I can learn more about this? Thank you.
My genes preceded me and formed the foundation of my existence and nature. I didn't choose my genes and I don't have direct control over them. The same goes for my early environments, nutrients and experiences. You should read "Determined: The Science of Life Without Free Will" by Professor Robert M. Sapolsky.
We are uncertain because we are not all-knowing. Which lottery numbers will be the winning numbers? If we knew that we would always be able to pick the winning numbers for the jackpot.
I agree.
Quoting Truth Seeker
Is it not a more fundamental question of should, regardless of could? What must one begin doing now, currently, in the gateway of this moment such that all the "could have beens" were worth suffering through?
So you agree that we are uncertain on many occasions. If the existence of options is not what causes us to be uncertain then what it is?
What do you mean?
No one has chosen their genes. But people don't blame their genes for the choices they have made. Free will is your mental state, which has nothing to do with your genes, environments and nutrients.
Making a choice is your mental event based on your reasoning and thinking on the various options. Nothing else is involved in making choices.
I understood your point but it seems that you didn't take my point.
Our choices can be voluntary but they are not free from determinants, constraints and consequences. Our reasoning and thinking depend entirely on our genes, environments, nutrients and experiences.
I did take on board your question and I answered it to the best of my knowledge. If you have a better answer, I am happy to read about it.
You can't give the whole credit for you own beliefs, aims and reasons to your physical circumstances since all three of those things are normative. If you find out that it's unreasonable for you to believe something, then you stop believing it. Likewise for your aims. And if someone finds out that a reason why they were doing something was bad, then they stop doing it. Those human rational abilities are fallible so it may happen that one holds unreasonable beliefs or makes unreasonable choices and, sometimes, one's circumstances can excuse those failures. But our physical circumstances never explain why our intentional actions are intelligible or what it is that makes those actions reasonable, when they are. Appealing to principle of evolutionary psychology, for instance, amounts to committing the naturalistic fallacy. And appealing to principles of neuroscience or physics and chemistry for explaining someone's bodily motions just amounts to changing the topic to something else. (See Ruth Garrett Millikan's paper What Is Behavior? A Philosophical Essay on Ethology and Individualism in Psychology, reprinted in White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice).
So, I would claim that the agent's beliefs and reasons are something more than the resolution of an incalculable number of interacting physical events. They may be, in a sense, made up of physical things and physical events (since human beings are made up of those things) but they are made up of such ingredients organized in functional ways. Your physical constituents are organized in such a was as to enable your practical rational abilities to choose actions in light of your good reasons for doing them, and the goodness of those reasons, and their appropriateness to your circumstances, don't reduce to physical laws. Hence, the explanations why those choices were made don't reduce to physical laws either and appeals to your physical circumstances (including brain processes) oftentimes are at best, incomplete and at worst irrelevant.
The other issue is that they all seem to be attempts to understand the observed behavior of the microworld using concepts derived from our experience of the familiar macroworld, and I see little reason to expect that is an entirely coherent endeavor. That said, I understand that we cannot help pursuing it.
Yes, we are not all-knowing, which is why we are unsure in certain situations. We don't know whether it is better to do something or not. That means we are dealing with options in those situations where we are not sure.
Having a thought requires an entity to experience it, what I call the mind. Putting this point aside, we are returning to my former point: How could we have options in our thoughts knowing that our thoughts are the result of the motion of matter and electromagnetic fields where these motions are deterministic? So we have to either exclude the existence of options, which I highly doubt to be possible, or we have to find a proper answer to this question. To be honest, I don't have an answer to the question and I doubt if anyone has an answer for it either so it is an open question.
Even when we are sure about the outcomes, we are still dealing with options. For example, let's say that I am walking and I notice dog poo on the pavement. I have thought of three options in this situation:
1. Clean up the dog poo.
2. Avoid stepping on the dog poo but not clean it up.
3. Step on the dog poo.
No one is coercing me to do any of the three things so my choice to do any of them is voluntary. However, my choice is not free from determinants, constraints and consequences.
If I choose option 1, it will cost me some time, effort and a plastic bag (if I have a plastic bag with me). Doing this will prevent someone else from stepping on the dog poo.
If I choose option 2, it will save me some time, effort and a plastic bag but there is still the risk of someone else stepping on the dog poo.
If I choose option 3, it will make my shoe dirty and I will have to either clean up my shoe or throw away my shoes or keep wearing shoes with dog poo on them and spread the dog poo from my shoes to the inside of my home.
Which of the three options I select is determined by my genes, my environments from my conception to the present, my nutrients from my conception to the present and my experiences from my conception to the present.
If I had the genes of a banana tree instead of the human genes I have, I would not be sentient and would not even notice the dog poo, never mind think about my options.
If I was in a life-threatening environment e.g. someone was shooting at me with a machine gun, I simply would not give the dog poo much thought. I would be preoccupied with how I can avoid getting shot by taking cover or running erratically.
If was deprived of nutrients as a zygote, I would not even get to be born. I would have died when I was in the womb.
If I experienced an accident which caused me to go blind, I would not have even noticed the dog poo.
I could go on and on and keep listing more and more scenarios but I don't want to spend any more time explaining how we are never free from determinants, constraints and consequences. Have you understood my point? If you haven't understood it, please let me know and I will try to explain further.
What makes you so sure "options" are ontologically real things, and not just a feature of maps rather than a feature of territories?
And if options ARE ontologically real things, why couldn't they be physical? Maybe a wave function is the physical manifestation of an option.
I talked about a situation when you are not certain, by this I mean you do not the the consequence of your decision.
They are real because I have had doubts in many situations in my life. It could be a feature of maps rather than territories but then we have to deal with the question I raised.
Quoting flannel jesus
I cannot see how they could be physical accepting that physical entities are deterministic by deterministic I mean that any state of matter only leads to one unique state later. If we accept that options are real in the physical world then it means that one state of matter may lead to one state or another state later and this is against the very definition of determinism.
Quoting flannel jesus
I believe in De Broglie-Bohm's interpretation. No Schrodinger cat paradox, no wave-particle duality, etc.
Neural nets - as in, things like Chat GPT - have doubts. They have ways of representing internal confidence levels about their models about the data they're ingesting.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yzGDwpRBx6TEcdeA5/a-chess-gpt-linear-emergent-world-representation
Neural nets are implemented physically, on physical hardware.
I don't see where this assumption that doubts can't exist in a mind that's implemented physically comes from. As far as I can tell, the evidence available suggests that that's incorrect, that physical implementations of world-modeling machines can and do have doubts.
Simply, there is no 'if' or 'different'; What actually happened trumps 'could have'.
We never know all the long-term consequences of our actions. For example, let's say in my previous example, I cleaned up the dog poo from the pavement. I know the immediate consequences of this action but I don't know what effect this action will have on myself and others a week, a month, a year, a decade, a century, a millennia and on and on down the line.
I agree with you. I'm just playing Physicalist's Advocate.
Quoting Truth Seeker4. Step on it [I]and[/I] clean it up.
Yes, the fourth option is also possible.
Interesting article. It however does not explain what is the source of doubts.
Then options are real if you don't know the consequences of your actions.
no, it shows instead that doubts are a part of an LLM, and we know that LLMs are implemented physically, on physical machinery, undergoing physical processes. It doesn't "explain the source of doubts" because that's not the point of the article, it just gives a very strong example of physically implemented concept of doubts.
Cool. So doubts are real and this means that options are real as well. We however don't know the source of doubts.
Sure.
Knowing or not knowing the consequences of our actions has nothing to do with options being real or not real. We can make voluntary choices. My point is that our choices are never free from determinants (genes, environments, nutrients and experiences), constraints and consequences.
Doubts are not allowed in a deterministic world. Everything is certain in a deterministic world since by definition determinism refers to a worldview in which each state of matter uniquely defines another state of matter later. So, I ask you this question whether you have ever had a doubt. If yes, then we are dealing with a problem, the problem being how doubt is possible. I don't think that anyone has a clear answer to this. So to me, the mental phenomena are not easy to understand and do not follow the rule of determinism.
The statement: "Doubts are not allowed in a deterministic world." is false.
It is correct given the definition of doubt.
I am talking about mental state doubt.
The mental state of experiencing doubt is not something special that sets it apart from other mental states. We experience many sensory perceptions, thoughts and emotions. They are all produced by our brain activities. Our brain activities are determined by our genes, environments, nutrients and experiences.
It is special. If we accept the mental phenomenon of doubt, we can conclude that options are real.
Quoting Truth Seeker
Yes, brain states are subject to change and are deterministic. The question is how doubt can arise from the brain, considering that it is a deterministic object.
No, doubting is not special. You clearly don't understand how the brain works. Please read "Being You: A New Science of Consciousness" by Anil Seth and "Determined: Life Without Free Will" by Robert M. Sapolsky. If you have any questions while reading these books, please ask here and I will do my best to answer them.
The doubt is special as I argued.
Quoting Truth Seeker
I have been working and reading on the philosophy of the mind for several years. Well, it seems to me that is an end to the discussion.
I know enough about the philosophy of the mind and I don't need to read another book on the topic.
I am not ignorant of the topic. I have no time to read a book that denies the reality of free will. Philosophers of mind still struggle with the Hard Problem of consciousness. I am wondering how then could address free will when they are unsure what consciousness is!
I am not a philosopher. I am a scientist. We make voluntary choices but our choices are never free from determinants, constraints and consequences. The so-called Hard Problem of Consciousness is not actually all that hard. It's a philosophical construct, nothing more. You could claim that I am a Philosophical Zombie. It would be impossible for me to prove to you that I am a conscious being. Just because it is impossible to prove to others that I am conscious, it does not mean I am a Philosophical Zombie. Philosophical Zombie is yet another philosophical construct, nothing more.
Let's say that we disagree and put an end to this discussion. Thanks for your time.
There is no objective basis for anyone to say, "yes" - even if it is true that we could have.
Consider why it seems like we could have: it's entirely in retrospect. But we're reevaluating it from our now-current mindset - not the mindset at the time of the choice.
Mindset includes one's emotional state, physical state, state of knowledge, immediate surroundings, most recent experiences. and the sequence of thoughts that led to the choice. Given all that, could we really have chosen differently? Maybe, but it is impossible to know. Hindsight doesn't establish it. We can't recreate the mindset.
Theoretically, I think yes. But this involves agreeing that something billions of years ago would have to have happened differently.
I think both, but I'm not a compatibilist. To my horror, I'm probably going to sound a bit like @apokrisis. We are determined by things we give a shit about, and our giving-a-shits constrain our choices. But within those constraints we are free to arbitrarily choose between alternatives we don't give a shit about.
But, what of it? That things might have been different does not imply the strong notion of "free will" that I suspect is incoherent.
There are many times that what [I]seemed[/I] to be the case was wrong. But we know they are wrong because it was demonstrated in one way or another. The default position isn't that anything that seems to be the case is not, and we don't need its falsehood demonstrated.
But I come at this from the opposite direction, it is the constraints of the hard physical world which restrict my strong free will. Take that away and I would have near absolute freedom.
Fair point, the choice-making process also gives us reason to believe we could have chosen differently. The choice was ours, not something imposed upon us.
But still, there were pre-existing predilections - flavors you know you like. There was a series of sights, sounds, and smells; a series of thoughts. The choice was a direct consequence. Something would need to have been different for a different choice to have been made.
Quoting Patterner
Why? Isn't it just because you know the choices were yours to make, that you went through the process and you are solely responsible for the choices?
Even though it seems like you could have chosen differently, it is impossible to know you could have.
I agree that it is impossible to know with 100% certainty.
That's interesting.
Yes, and this implies determinism can neither be proven, nor disproven, by appealing to free will.
Assume the mind is not equivalent to the brain. Could you have chosen differently? You still had a set of background beliefs, a set of conditioned responses, a particular emotional state and physical state, were subject to a particular set of stimuli in your immediate environment, and you had a particular series of thoughts that concluded with the specific ice cream order that you made. Given this full context, how could you have made a different choice? You'd have to introduce randomnness. Randomness entails a factor not under our control.
It's not just randomness that is a factor not under our control. We don't control the genes we inherit, our early environments, our early nutrients and our early experiences. As we grow older, we acquire some control over our environments, nutrients and experiences, but even then, we don't have 100% control.
How? Because you're ignoring another major factor in Human Decision Making, namely randomness. That is, while commonly recalled (important) decisions are made totally or mostly on logical grounds, most minor to miniscule decisions aren't made after exhaustive consideration, since they're trivial or below. Which urinal do you choose at the airport? Could you have cjosen a different one under identical circumstances? I think: yes. The bigger question is: does it matter?
But is there actually true randomness involved? This would be impossible to establish. I mentioned the role of physical and emotional state, conditioned responses, and of subtle factors in the environment. These could constitute subconscious factors that determine the decision. It's impossible to know. .
Thank you for the thoughtful response. You raise a key point that in chaotic systems, even minute quantum fluctuations could, in theory, scale up to macroscopic differences (the quantum butterfly effect). However, I think this doesnt meaningfully undermine determinism for the following reasons:
1. Determinism vs. Predictability:
Determinism doesnt require predictability. A system can be deterministic and yet practically unpredictable due to sensitivity to initial conditions. Chaos theory actually presupposes determinism - small differences in starting conditions lead to vastly different outcomes because the system follows deterministic laws. If the system were non-deterministic, the equations of chaos wouldnt even apply.
2. Quantum Amplification Is Not Evidence of Freedom:
As you already noted, even if quantum indeterminacy occasionally affects macroscopic events, randomness is not freedom. A decision influenced by quantum noise is not a free decision its just probabilistic. It replaces deterministic necessity with stochastic chance. That doesnt rescue libertarian free will; it only introduces randomness into causation.
3. Quantum Interpretations and Evidence:
Youre right that there are non-deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics - such as Copenhagen, GRW, or QBism - but there are also deterministic ones: de Broglie-Bohm (pilot-wave), Many-Worlds, and superdeterministic models. None of them are empirically distinguishable so far. Until we have direct evidence for objective indeterminacy, determinism remains a coherent and arguably simpler hypothesis (per Occams razor).
4. Macroscopic Decoherence:
Decoherence ensures that quantum superpositions in the brain or weather systems effectively collapse into stable classical states extremely quickly. Whatever quantum noise exists gets averaged out before it can influence neural computation in any meaningful way - except in speculative scenarios, which remain unproven.
So, while I agree that quantum indeterminacy might introduce genuine randomness into physical systems, I dont see how that transforms causality into freedom or invalidates the deterministic model of the universe as a whole. At best, it replaces determinism with a mix of determinism + randomness - neither of which grants us metaphysical free will.
Apologies for not seeing that question for months.
There are whole books, yes. A nice (but still pop) article is this one:
https://www.space.com/chaos-theory-explainer-unpredictable-systems.html
The wiki version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect
The latter link in places talks specifically about the small initial differences being different quantum outcomes. The best known quantum amplifier is Schrodinger's cat, where a single quantum event quickly determines the fate of the cat, even if it isn't hidden in a box.
Quoting Truth SeekerEven classical mechanics has been shown to be nondeterministic. Norton's dome is a great example of an effect without a cause. Nevertheless, a deterministic interpretation of physics would probably require hidden variables that determine the effect that appears uncaused.
But it doesn't require determinism. Chaos theory applies just as well to nondeterministic interpretations of physics.
Well, deterministic equations would not apply. How about Schrodinger's equation? That function is very chaotic, and it is deterministic only under interpretations. like MWI.
Agree. So very few seem to realize this.
To me, freedom is making your own choices and not having something else do it for you. Determinism is a great tool for this, which is why almost all decision making devices utilize as much as possible deterministic mechanisms such as binary logic.
Superdeterminism is not listed as a valid interpretation of QM since it invalidates pretty much all empirical evidence. It's a bit like BiV view in that manner. The view doesn't allow one to trust any evidence.
MWI is a good example of chaotic behavior. You have all these worlds, and since weather and which creatures evolve are all chaotic functions, most of those worlds don't have you in it, or even humans. Most of those worlds don't have Earth in it. The deterministic part only says that all these possibilities must exist. There's no chance to any of them. But do they exist equally? That's a weird question to ponder.
No, I don't buy into MWI since I feel it gets some critical things wrong.
Of the two deterministic interpretations you mention, MWI is arguably the simplest, and DBB is probably the most complicated. This illustrates that 'deterministic' is not necessarily 'simpler'.
At least under interpretations that support collapse.
Yes, that what I meant by 'utilize as much as possible deterministic mechanisms'.
In particular, no biological quantum amplifier has been found, and such a mechanism would very much have quickly evolved if there was any useful information in that quantum noise.
Bottom line is that we pretty much agree with each other.
Regarding Nortons dome, I think its an interesting mathematical curiosity rather than a physically realistic case of indeterminism. It depends on idealized assumptions (e.g., perfectly frictionless surface, infinite precision in initial conditions) that dont occur in nature. Still, its a useful illustration that even Newtonian mechanics can be formulated to allow indeterminate solutions under certain boundary conditions.
As for the quantumchaos connection, yes - Schrödingers cat is indeed the archetypal quantum amplifier, though its an artificial setup. In natural systems like weather, decoherence tends to suppress quantum-level randomness before it can scale up meaningfully. Lorenzs butterfly effect remains classical chaos: deterministic, yet unpredictable in practice because initial conditions can never be measured with infinite precision. Whether a microscopic quantum fluctuation could actually alter a macroscopic weather pattern remains an open question - interesting but speculative.
I agree with you that determinism is a great tool for agency. Even if all our choices are determined, they are still our choices - the outputs of our own brains, reasoning, and values. Indeterminacy doesnt enhance freedom; it merely adds noise.
On superdeterminism: I share your concern. Its unfalsifiable if taken literally (since it could explain away any experimental result), but it remains conceptually valuable in exploring whether quantum correlations might arise from deeper causal connections. I dont endorse it, but I dont dismiss it either until we have decisive evidence.
You put it well: the bottom line is that we mostly agree - especially that neither pure determinism nor indeterminism rescues libertarian free will. What matters is understanding the causal web as fully as possible.
Thanks again for such a stimulating exchange. Discussions like this remind me how philosophy and physics intersect in fascinating ways.
Quoting Truth Seeker
Depending on definitions, the two are not necessarily exclusive.
Quoting Patterner
There you go. You seem to have a grasp on what choice actually is.
Quoting AmadeusDBeing able to review it amounts to different initial conditions.
Billions of years?? It would be interesting, in say MWI, so see how long it take for two worlds split from the same initial conditions to result in a different decision being made. It can be one second, but probably minutes. Maybe even days for a big decision like 'should I propose marriage to this girl?'. But billions of years? No. Your very existence, let along some decision you make, is due to quantum events at most a short time before your conception.
Quoting Truth SeekerAny determinism. That is also true under what is called soft determinism.
But as you've posted, determinism has little if anything to do with free will, or with moral responsibility. Substance dualism is a weird wrench in this debate. If there are two things, only the one in control is responsible for the actions of the body. So say if I get possessed by a demon (rabies say) and bite somebody, infecting them, am I responsible for that or is the demon? Is it fair to convict a rabid human of assault if they bite somebody? Kind of a moot point since they're going to die shortly anyway.
Quoting PunshhhSure. I will to fly like superman, but damn that gravity compelling otherwise.
Take away that and there would be no you have this freedom.
Quoting Relativist
Yes. This is why determinism is irrelevant to the free will debate.
If a supernatural entity is making your choices, then not only is determinism false, but all of natural physics is false. A whole new theory is needed, and there currently isn't one proposed.
As has been pointed out, natural physics is regularly updated, and thus the current consensus view is not 'the truth'. But despite all the updates and new discoveries, one thing stands: Physics operates under a set of rules. We're still discovering those rules, but some definitions of moral responsibility require the lack of any rules. That's not ever going to be found to be the case.
Quoting LuckyR
I pretty much deny this. All evolved decision making structures have seemed to favor deterministic primitives (such as logic gates), with no randomness, which Truth Seeker above correctly classifies as noise, something to be filtered out, not to be leveraged.
Sure, unpredictable is sometimes an advantage. Witness the erratic flight path of a moth, making it harder to catch in flight. But it uses deterministic mechanisms to achieve that unpredictability, not leveraging random processes.
Quoting Truth SeekerClassical physics is a mathematical model, which some have proposed is reversible. No physics is violated by watching the pool balls move back into the triangle with all the energy/momentum transferred to the cue ball stopped by the cue.
Norton's dome demonstrates that classical mathematics is actually not reversible, nor is it deterministic, the way that the equations seem to be at first glance.
You have a reference for this assertion, because I don't buy it at all. Most quantum randomness gets averaged out, sure, but each causes a completely different state of a given system, even if it's only a different location and velocity of each and every liquid molecule.
Evolution depends on quantum randomness, without which mutations would rarely occur and progress would proceed at a snails pace. There's a fine balance to be had there. Too much quantum radiation and DNA gets destroyed before it can be filtered for fitness. Too little and there's no diversity to evolve something better.
Here are some references that support this:
1. Wojciech Zurek (2003). Decoherence, einselection, and the quantum origins of the classical. Reviews of Modern Physics, 75, 715775.
Zurek explains that decoherence times for macroscopic systems at room temperature are extraordinarily short (on the order of (10^-20) seconds), meaning superpositions collapse into classical mixtures almost instantly.
DOI: 10.1103/RevModPhys.75.715
2. Joos & Zeh (1985). The emergence of classical properties through interaction with the environment. Zeitschrift für Physik B Condensed Matter, 59, 223243.
They calculate that even a dust grain in air decoheres in about (10^-31) seconds due to collisions with air molecules and photons - long before any macroscopic process could amplify quantum noise.
3. Max Tegmark (2000). Importance of quantum decoherence in brain processes. Physical Review E, 61, 41944206.
Tegmark estimated decoherence times in the brain at (10^-13) to (10^-20) seconds, concluding that biological systems are effectively classical. The same reasoning applies (even more strongly) to meteorological systems, where temperature and particle interactions are vastly higher.
In short, quantum coherence does not persist long enough in atmospheric systems to influence large-scale weather patterns. While every individual molecular collision is, in a sense, quantum, the statistical ensemble of billions of interactions behaves deterministically according to classical thermodynamics. Thats why classical models like NavierStokes work so well for weather prediction (up to chaotic limits of measurement precision), without needing to invoke quantum probability.
That said, I fully agree with you that quantum randomness is crucial to mutation-level processes in biology - those occur in small, shielded molecular systems, where quantum tunnelling or base-pairing transitions can indeed introduce randomness before decoherence sets in. The key distinction is scale and isolation: quantum effects matter in micro-environments, but decoherence washes them out in large, warm, chaotic systems like the atmosphere.
Here are two images I created to help explain my worldview:
I answered yes, but that is conditional on having better information. Your question is tied to notions of good and evil and the tendency to judge people as good or evil. I do not believe we are good or evil, but we do the best we can with what we know, and our conscience and feelings of regret need good information so we can avoid those regrets.
Notice the word "conscience" meanings coming out of knowledge.
Exactly. I said you were "ignoring" randomness, your wording is "denying". Same thing. Just so you know, randomness exists, human denials notwithstanding.
If you need me to elaborate, does wishing you made a different choice effect the past choices you made? If it doesn't, then the answer to the thread question and survey has to be a no. Argue with me all you like, but regret is an extremely common conundrum for humans and i'm rather experienced.
I guess "yes" is the right answer if there are alternate dimensions where people made different choices, but i don't know about those, so i can't answer yes.
The question is not whether someone can change a choice which is already made, but whether one could have, at that time, the time when the choice was made, chose something different.
We are talking about choices that could have only been made one time.
And if we only had one choice at the time, then yes, the answer is no. But I have no idea why determinism works here. I actually do not understand the relationship between determinism and the choices we make. The choices we make in our daily life are nothing compared to what determinism has in store for us.
Here are my examples:
1. We do not have a choice but to be a moral agent (not to say we will be moral, just that we either be moral or immoral).
2. We do not have a choice as to thoughts. We will have thoughts and imaginations. That's determined given our constitution.
4. Perception is determined, unless you're born a lump of flesh. We will perceive, period.
5. Desires are determined -- you can have difference desires, but you will have desires absolutely.
What do you mean by "one time"? Do you deny that a person can deliberate, procrastinate, or otherwise delay in decision making, such that the choice occurs over a period of time?
Quoting Truth Seeker
Quoting Truth Seeker
OK, very much yes on the rapid decay of coherence. But this does not in any way prevent changes from propagating to the larger scales in any chaotic system (such as the atmosphere). Sure, a brick wall is going to stand for decades without quantum interactions having any meaningful effect, but a wall is not a particulrly chaotic system.
All three supporting only the first part I agreed with, yes. None of them support quantum differences propagating into macroscopic differences.
The question you need to ask is this: Given say MWI where you have all these different worlds splitting due to quantum events, how long does it take for classical differences to appear.
For the weather, this can take months.to be unrecognizably different. For a brick wall, probably decades. For a meteor hitting or missing Earth, probably millennia. For a human to choose one thing instead of another, maybe 10 minutes (a guess), and that depend on the gravity of the choice being made.
For the conception of a human, perhaps under a minute.
MWI is illustrative, but in any interpretation, specific quantum effects take about this long to cause or prevent these various macroscopic events.
Coherence is not in any way required for quantum events to have an effect. Quite the opposite. Absent a measurement (collapse?) of some sort, quantum events can have no effect..
Yes, but classical thermodynamics is a very chaotic system. Any difference, no matter how tiny, amplify into massive differences.
I agree that quantum improbability cannot be worked into weather prediction since there is no way to predict it, and weather prediction is done at significantly larger granularity, hardly a simulation at the atomic level. Hence it is good for a week or two at best. After that, you consult the farmer's almanac.
It is illuminating to track the weather prediction for a given day. It appears on my site 10 days hence. So save that prediction each day until the day in question arises. See how much the prediction changes as the day grows nearer. Sometimes it is fairly stable, but often it's all over the map, meaning they're practically guessing.
Quoting LuckyR
Sure, it exists, but decision making structures (both machine and biological) are designed to filter out the randomness out and leverage only deterministic processes. I mean, neither transistors nor neurons would function at all without quantum effects like tunneling, but both are designed to produce a repeatable classical effect, not a random one.
No i never said that, what i'm trying to say is this:
"Could anyone have made a different choice in the past than the ones they made?"
It's fine and perfectly reasonable to say to yourself "i could have done _____ differently, for _____ reasons", but the phrasing of the question is "could anyone have made a different choice". We tell ourselves we should/could have made different choices as a narrative that will help us make different choices in the future, but the truth is the choice we made was already made.
There's an ancient phrase that "you can't step into the same river twice", and if you believe the validity of the phrase, then you will answer no to the question, but otherwise, you will answer yes. For me to answer "yes", it would imply that the "anyone" had different knowledge or at least knew they were about to do something wrong or imperfectly.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I had no idea a single choice could occur over a period of time. Could you elaborate on that? For example, what's the grey area between doing and not doing?
This is honestly one of the interesting things about "talking" on open internet forums: it always seems like a mistake because it's so open ended.
I don't see the point. I agree, a choice made cannot be changed. But this does not negate the proposition that one could have made a different choice at the time when that choice was being made. This is just a feature of the nature of time. At the present, when time is passing we are free to make different choices. So when I look backward in time, I can say that "I could have made a different choice", meaning that at that time I was free to choose an alternative. It does not mean that it is possible that I actually made a choice other than I did. That, I believe, is a gross misunderstanding of the op, due to the ambiguity of "could have".
Quoting ProtagoranSocratist
I think this is incorrect. I think you simply misunderstand the op's use of "could have", as explained above.
Quoting ProtagoranSocratist
How long does it take you to decide? Do you not deliberate? Take a simple math question for example, like 14x8-32+18, and time how long it takes you to decide what the answer is. Some choices take days, weeks, even years, to be decided.
Take any choice you made in the past as an example. What were the reasons you made that choice? If given the same reasons would you have made a different choice? How and why?
It seems to me that you only realize you could have made a different choice if you had access to different information, or reasons, than you did at the moment you made the choice. As such realizing you could have made a different choice always comes after the fact that you made the choice and now know the consequences and other possible choices that could have been made (more information), that was not available at the moment of decision.
So no, you could not have made a different choice because that would have meant that you had different information than you did when you made the decision.
Well, do you know Jimmy Cricket?
Pinocchio was talked into going to a fun park instead of school, but the fun park turned into a place where children were turned into donkeys, and Pinocchio almost didn't escape.
Pinocchio was a wooden puppet, and a Blue Fairy turned him into a real boy and appointed Jimmy Cricket to help him make good decisions. A problem we have is not always knowing right from wrong. If we are lucky, we will have an uncomfortable feeling if we are considering doing something wrong, but often things are moving too fast, or we honestly believe we are doing the right thing, or we rationalize it isn't that bad, and we find out too late that it was the wrong and the consequences were that bad or worse, and then we get the uncomfortable feeling, and feelings of regret may follow. That uncomfortable feeling is like Jimmy Cricket trying to keep Pinocchio out of trouble.
Humans are pretty well programmed to be cooperative and moral, just as all social animals are programmed with social rules. But of course, things can go wrong, mostly because we don't know enough to know the right thing to do. Cicero said, God's law is 'right reason.' When perfectly understood, it is called 'wisdom.' When applied by government in regulating human relations it is called 'justice. Cicero
Today, we are very concerned about being smart, but unfortunately, we have neglected the need to develop wisdom. I think this cultural change leads to some serious problems, but at the same time, we have learned so many important things, and I hope this all balances out to a better future.
Yes, that's their design. And when someone is contemplating an important decision, they bring all of that design to bear on the problem. How much of our decision making prowess do we bring to deciding which urinal to use in the public bathroom? Very, very little. What is taking the place of that unused neurological function? Habit perhaps or pattern matching. But what about a novel (no habit nor pattern) yet unimportant "choice"? It may not fulfill the statistical definition of the word "random", but in the absence of a repeatable, logical train of thought, it functionally resembles "randomness".
That's fine, you can believe it's you or someone else could have done something differently, but it's just an opinion. For me, i think its really important to separate imaginary from real, hypothetical from not.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, im not misunderstanding anything. It's a very simple logical exercise. When someone misunderstands text, it's better to just explain what is being musunderstood if you have the better understanding.
But yes, i was wrong that "if you believe that quote, you will agree with me", but to me the trains of knowledge are consistent: if i can't step in the same river twice (as the river is always changing), then i also couldn't have done anything differently in the past...but if you reason "i have a local river called river calhoun, and i have stepped in it twice! Heraclitus was wrong!", then i can see why you would believe that you could have made different choices in the past.
Maybe it's the same river if there's no current, and it becomes a different one as the current starts, but as another user has said about the "could" question, whether you can step in the same river twice is a matter of perception.
I agree.
1. On Decoherence vs. Propagation of Quantum Effects
I agree that quantum coherence is not required for a quantum event to have macroscopic consequences. My point, however, is that once decoherence has occurred, the resulting branch (or outcome) behaves classically, and further amplification of that quantum difference depends on the sensitivity to initial conditions within the system in question.
So while a chaotic system like the atmosphere can indeed amplify microscopic differences, the relevant question is how often quantum noise actually changes initial conditions at scales that matter for macroscopic divergence. The overwhelming majority of microscopic variations wash out statistically - only in rare, non-averaging circumstances do they cascade upward. Hence, quantum randomness provides the ultimate floor of uncertainty, but not a practically observable driver of weather dynamics.
2. On the Timescale of Divergence
I appreciate your breakdown - minutes for human choice, months for weather, millennia for asteroid trajectories, etc. That seems broadly reasonable as an order-of-magnitude intuition under MWI or any interpretation that preserves causal continuity. Whats worth emphasizing, though, is that those divergence times describe when outcomes become empirically distinguishable, not when quantum indeterminacy begins influencing them. The influence starts at the quantum event; its just that the macroscopic consequences take time to manifest and become measurable.
3. On Determinism and Randomness in Complex Systems
I also agree that classical thermodynamics is chaotic, and that even an infinitesimal perturbation can, in principle, lead to vastly different outcomes. However, that doesnt mean the macroscopic weather is quantum random in any meaningful sense - only that its deterministic equations are sensitive to initial data we can never measure with infinite precision. The randomness, therefore, is epistemic, not ontic arising from limited knowledge rather than fundamental indeterminacy.
Quantum randomness sets the ultimate limit of predictability, but chaos is what magnifies that limit into practical unpredictability.
4. On Decision-Making Systems and Quantum Filtering
I completely agree that biological and technological systems are designed to suppress or filter quantum noise. The fact that transistors, neurons, and ion channels function reliably at all is testament to that design. Quantum tunneling, superposition, or entanglement may underlie the microphysics, but the emergent computation (neural or digital) operates in the classical regime. So while randomness exists, most functional systems are robustly deterministic within the energy and temperature ranges they inhabit.
* Decoherence kills coherence extremely fast in macroscopic environments.
* Chaotic systems can amplify any difference, including quantum ones, but not all microscopic noise scales up meaningfully.
* Macroscopic unpredictability is largely classical chaos, not ongoing quantum indeterminacy.
* Living and engineered systems filter quantum randomness to maintain stability and reproducibility.
So while I agree with you that quantum events can, in principle, propagate to the macro-scale through chaotic amplification, I maintain that in natural systems like the atmosphere, such amplification is statistically negligible in practice - the weather is unpredictable, but not quantumly so.
I really don't see how your analogy about the two rivers is relevant. The question is, could the person, at the time prior to stepping into the river, have decided at that time, not to step into the river. I think that was a real possibility to the person at that time. Therefore at that time the person could have decided not to step into it. How do you think stepping into the same river twice is relevant?
Stop trying to change the framing of OPs question: the question is "anyone". This kind of behavior is confusing. It's not a hypothetical scenario, because literally is possible in logic games and scenarios. Read the sleeping beauty thread if you don't agree.
I did my best to explain my logic. I will not repeat myself.
How often? Ever time for a chaotic system. Takes time to diverge, but given a trillion decoherence events in a marble (not even in the atmosphere) in the space of a nanosecond, there's a lot more than a trillion worlds resulting from that, and the weather will be different in all of them, assuming (unreasonably) no further splits. I mean, eventually there's only so many different weather patterns and by chance some of then start looking like each other (does that qualify as strange attractors?). But the marble has a fair chance of still being a marble in almost all of those worlds.
This is the part for which a reference would help. Clearly we still disagree on this point. The 'butterfly effect' specifically used weather as its example. Small changes matter. Not sometime, but all of them: any difference amplifies.
Well, first, to distinguish two outcomes, both must be observed by the same observer. That's not going to happen. Secondly, the butterfly can have an empirical effect immediately, but the
The deterministic equations (in a simulation say) are not to infinite detail and precision, so yes, quantum effects are ignored. The real equations are not deterministic since they are (theoretically) infinitely precise, and incomplete since quantum randomness cannot be part of the initial conditions. There are probably no initial conditions. Such a thing would require counterfactual definiteness, which is possible but not terribly likely.
You don't know that. Yes, there are deterministic interpretations, but even given MWI (quite deterministic) and perfect knowledge, not even God can predict where the photon will hit the screen, and that's not even a chaotic effect.
Which is why a computer typically runs the same code identically every time, given identical inputs. Ditto for a brain. Both work this way even given a non-deterministic interpretation of physics.
Again, agree, which is why I suspect a human can be fully simulated using a classical simulation that ignores quantum effects, unless of course the human simulated happens to want to perform quantum experiments in his simulated lab.
Sort of. Don't forget outside factors. My deterministic braIn might nevertheless decide to wear a coat or not depending on some quantum event months ago that made it cold or warm out today.
:up:
Mind you, I agree that not all microscopic noise scales up meaningfully, but only because many systems (bricks for instance) are not all that chaotic at classical scales. The weather is not one of them, so I deny this below:
[/quote]I maintain that in natural systems like the atmosphere, such amplification is statistically negligible in practice[/quote]
[quote=noAxioms]neither transistors nor neurons would function at all without quantum effects like tunneling, but both are designed to produce a repeatable classical effect, not a random one[/quote]
Quoting LuckyRYou make it sound so rational.
Take the 'should I cheat on my spouse' decision. I think chemistry, possibly more than rational logic, tends to influence such decisions. I wonder if robots currently can demonstrate that sort of internal conflict of interests.
What's that got to do with the what is effectively a free will/determinism debate? Free will is typically pitched as the rational side, with the chemicals often portrayed in the role of 'being compelled otherwise by physics'. Nonsense. Both are physics, and you're definitely responsible for your choice.
Agree, until you suggest that you are actually leveraging quantum randomness when doing something like urinal selection (which definitely has rules to it, and is thus a poor example), or rock-paper-scissors, where unpredictability (but not randomness) takes the day.
If I may butt in: Quoting ProtagoranSocratistGood indication that you're talking past somebody. I also consider choice to be a process, not an event. From experimentation, it seems that it is essentially made before one becomes aware of the choice having been made, but even once made, one can change one's mind.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I think that is more or less the question, but it is ill-phrased. I can answer either way.
Classically, if the state (of all of you) immediately prior to the point (and not the process) of decision was the same, it means the process was already arriving at this conclusion. How could it not act on that process, regardless of where you consider that mechanism to take place? If you don't mean the state at that point, then when?
For instance, given two identical states hours (minutes, seconds?) before the decision, could the two states evolve differently? Yea, sure. My example above about choosing to wear a coat today leverages that sort of 'deciding otherwise'. But that's a case of, immediately before the decision, the environment being different, despite identical states some time prior.
All that seems utterly irrelevant to one being responsible for the decision. If you choose to skip the coat today and you get uncomfortably cold when you go out, who's fault do you think that is? Physics or you? Free will doesn't seem to have anything to do with it.
I don't think we can accurately talk about real points within what is assumed to be a continuous process. This is the problem with representing the end of the decision making process as the "conclusion". "Conclusions" implies an end point. In reality, even as we are acting we are free to change our minds as the conditions require, so "conclusion" is arbitrarily assigned.
Therefore, to speak about a point immediately prior to the point of conclusion, really confuses the issue. When we remove those arbitrarily assumed "points", then we have a process which is in theory infinitely divisible. Then at any time in that duration the process could theoretically be changed. Even between your two arbitrary points, A being immediately prior to B, being the point of decision, there must be a duration of time during which a change in the process could occur between the arbitrarily assumed A and B.
The further problem however, would be the mechanism of such a change. Since I've already outlawed points, to get to this position, I cannot now say that the change happens at a point in between the two. This leaves a problem.
It can be either one: i can think about how i want to murder someone (technically, part of the choice, in the "choice is process" logic). If i decide it's the right decision, then the choice is made, and then i would start answering the question of how. I can change my mind still during this process, saying to myself "no, it's a bad idea to do this", i made a second choice, putting an end to my "how" process. Either way, i made two choices.
1. On Decoherence and Chaotic Amplification
I appreciate your clarification. I agree that once decoherence has occurred, each branch behaves classically. My emphasis was never that quantum events never cascade upward, but that most do not in practice. Chaotic sensitivity doesnt guarantee amplification of all microscopic noise; it only ensures that some minute differences can diverge over time. The key is statistical significance, not logical possibility.
The fact that there are trillions of decoherence events per nanosecond doesnt entail that every one creates a macroscopically distinct weather trajectory. Many microscopic perturbations occur below the systems Lyapunov horizon and are absorbed by dissipative averaging. The butterfly effect metaphor was intended to illustrate sensitivity, not to claim that every quantum fluctuation alters the weather.
So:
Yes, chaos implies amplification of some differences.
No, it doesnt imply that quantum noise routinely dominates macroscopic evolution.
Empirically, ensemble models of the atmosphere converge statistically even when perturbed at Planck-scale levels, suggesting the mean state is robust, though individual trajectories differ. (See Lorenz 1969; Palmer 2015.)
2. On Determinism, Ontic vs. Epistemic Randomness
Youre right that we cant know that randomness is purely epistemic. My point is pragmatic: theres no experimental evidence that ontic indeterminacy penetrates to the macroscopic domain in any controllable way.
MWI, Bohmian mechanics, and objective-collapse theories all make the same statistical predictions. So whether randomness is ontic or epistemic is metaphysical until we have a test that distinguishes them.
Even if indeterminacy is ontic, our weather forecasts, computer simulations, and neural computations behave classically because decoherence has rendered the underlying quantum superpositions unobservable.
So Id phrase it this way:
The world might be ontically indeterministic, but macroscopic unpredictability is functionally classical.
3. On Functional Robustness
Completely agree: both transistors and neurons rely on quantum effects yet yield stable classical outputs. The entire architecture of computation, biological or digital, exists precisely because thermal noise, tunnelling, and decoherence are averaged out or counterbalanced.
Thats why we can meaningfully say the brain implements a computation without appealing to hidden quantum randomness. Penrose-style arguments for quantum consciousness have not found empirical support.
4. On Choice, Process, and Responsibility
I share your intuition that a choice unfolds over time, not as a single instant.
Libet-type studies show neural precursors before conscious awareness, yet subsequent vetoes demonstrate ongoing integration rather than fatalistic pre-commitment.
Determinism doesnt nullify responsibility. The self is part of the causal web. Physics made me do it is no more an excuse than my character made me do it. In either case, the agent and the cause coincide.
Thus, even in a deterministic universe, moral responsibility is preserved as long as actions flow from the agents own motivations and reasoning processes rather than external coercion.
5. Summary
Decoherence ? classicality; not all micro noise scales up.
Chaos ? sensitivity; not universality of amplification.
Randomness ? possibly ontic, but operationally epistemic.
Functional systems ? quantum-grounded but classically robust.
Agency ? compatible with determinism when causation runs through the agent.
Quantum indeterminacy might underlie reality, but classical chaos and cognitive computation sit comfortably atop it.
Responsibility remains a structural property of agency, not an escape hatch from physics.
I concede that the term "randomness" in the context of this conversation is not true statistical Randomness, rather a placeholder term to describe the absence of a logical train of thought as pertains to decision making, pondering, if you will. Thus I'll take your "agree"ment and call it a day.
We can cut to the chase, everyone agrees that humans ponder decisions, weigh the pros and cons of possible choices. What folks disagree on is whether this pondering is a functional illusion, such that I was always going to select chocolate, never vanilla, regardless of going through the act of pondering my "choice". In this scenario one can never go back and make a different "choice", because the concept of "choice" was an illusion. It was always going to be chocolate. Most, however believe that pondering is functionally real and thus yes, they could have selected vanilla. There is no Real World way to prove it one way or another and the answer similarly has no Real World implication since it can only be demonstrated theoretically, never in reality. But I find it more psychologically coherent to believe what I perceive, then to assume my experience is an (unprovable) illusion.
The mathematics says otherwise. Any quantum decoherence event, say the decay of some nucleus in a brick somewhere, will have an effect on Mars possibly within 10 minutes, and will cause a completely different weather pattern on Mars withing months. The brick on the other hand (after even a second) will have all its atoms having different individual momentums, but the classical brick will still be mostly unchanged after a year. This is a logical necessity for any quantum event. If it has no such cascading effect, then it didn't actually happen, by any non-counterfactual definition of 'happened'.
If it doesn't, then the event probably took place outside our event horizon, which is currently about 16 GLY away, not far beyond the Hubble sphere.
Sure, almost all perturbations occur below a system's Lyapunov horizon, which just means that more time is needed (couple days in the case of weather) for chaotic differences to become classically distinct.
Depends on your definition of 'dominates'. Yes, the state of a chaotic system is a function of every input, no matter how trivial. Yes, they all average out and statistically the weather is more or less the same each year, cold in winter, etc. But the actual state of the weather at a given moment is not classically determined. There is no event that doesn't matter.
Coin flips are a lot like the weather. Take trillions of coins, black & white on opposite sides, and throw them on ground and look at it from an airplane. It looks gray every time, no matter how many tries you attempt. But up close, each toss is distinct, and if those distinctions amplify in a chaotic manner, different patterns will form with each toss, and those classical patterns will very much be visible for the airplane.
I was hoping for Conway's Game of Life to drive the chaos, but that game is actually not very chaotic, and the resulting patterns probably would just look mostly white from a distance with no distinct structures emerging like hurricanes.
Perturbations in ensemble models are far larger than Planck level. Yes, hurricanes, once formed, tend to be somewhat predictable for 8-10 days out. The perturbations are effectively running the model multiple times with minor differences, generating a series of diverging predictions. You average out those predictions to get a most probable path. Run those difference out to 3 weeks and major divergence will result.
Quantum theory (not any of its interpretations even) does not allow any indeterminacy to be controlled. The mathematical model from the theory also disallows any information to be gathered from the randomness. If it were otherwise, the theory would be falsified.
I hate to be a bother, but there is no collapse at all under MWI, and DBB is phenomenological collapse only, not ontic. This is a set of objective collapse interpretations posited separately by Ghirardi, Weber, Penrose.
The interpretations you list are deterministic. Most others are not. Under MWI, you could have, and actually did, choose otherwise (but was that you?). Under DBB, you could not have chosen otherwise.
Every interpretation makes the same statistical predictions. Superdeterminism doesn't, but it's not a valid interpretation of QM, just an alternate interpretation of the physics.
Still, I agree with your point 2. It doesn't matter whether randomness is ontic or epistemic. There will never be a test for that.
I agree with this, but remember that brains and computers are not closed systems, and the inputs might be subject to chaotic effects. It is the instability of those inputs that mostly accounts for a person 'having done otherwise' in two diverging worlds.
See 'insanity defense', which is effectively the latter. Still responsible, but different kind of jail.
Anyway, we also seem to agree on point 4.
Quoting LuckyRThe pondering is not an illusion. With the possible exception of epiphenomenalism, the pondering takes place, and the decision is the result of that. Given DBB style determinism, your decision to select chocolate was set at the big bang. Not true under almost any other interpretation, but under all of them (any scientific interpretation), the chocolate decision was a function of state just prior to the pondering, which does not mean it wasn't your decision.
Under non-QM philosophies, there's more going on than what science knows about, and all bets are off. How this makes you more responsible has never been justified to my satisfaction, but if an entity external to the universe is what's choosing chocolate, then that entity (and not the body it controls) is what's responsible to another entity also not part of the universe.
Of all that, the first paragraph is a monist take. The dualists are the ones that suggest that one is not responsible (to whom?) for their actions if the actions are due to a view with which they don't agree. All very straw man.
That's a total crock. It being a choice has nothing to do with it being deterministic or not, since choice is the mechanism by which multiple options are narrowed down to one. Your assertion makes the classical mistake of conflating a sound mechanism for selecting from multiple options, with being compelled against one's will to select otherwise, the latter of which actually does make it not a real choice, and thus takes away (not gives) responsibility.
In the end, one cannot make two choices. One cannot have chosen vanilla if chocolate was chosen, true in deterministic, random, and compelled scenarios.
Any choice making mechanism requires as much deterministic processes as possible, minimizing the randomness which is the alternative.
3rd alternative: let somebody else choose for you, which seems to make not you responsible, but rather the other person. Imagine crossing the street this way. You close your eyes and go when somebody else says to. If you get hit, it's his fault, but you still are the one enduring the consequences.
Quoting Metaphysician UndercoverAgree. Also don't think the process of making a choice has an end point, like all pondering has ceased and all that's left is to implement the choice (say "chocolate please" to the ice cream guy). Cute idealized description, but that's not how it works.
You seem to agree, balking that 'conclusion' implies an end point.
Ah, now we get into adjacent points and Zeno and that whole rat hole. Agree, we avoid that path.
What's the problem then? Change happens over time. Where's the problem? I made no mention of points in that.
What happened to decisions and the eventual state of no longer being able to have chosen otherwise?
Quoting ProtagoranSocratist
What I got from this is that choices can be broken down into sub-choices, and conversely combined into larger choices.
Of course the steps need not be thus ordered. I have pondered 'how to murder' far more often than any actual decision to go and do it, not counting all the bug smitings and mammal murders.
Took out my first Opossum just a couple weeks ago. It wasn't a conscious choice to do so.
...and you did so with a car, correct? Then it's possumslaughter, and not murder...
I think the problem is, that if change happens over time, and a person can always change one's mind as time passes, then how does that state of not being able to choose otherwise ever come about?
I think that "not being able to choose" is always there, to some degree, as what is impossible. One cannot make happen what is impossible. So as time passes what is possible, and what is impossible, is always changing. That's what change is. We make our decisions based on how we understand what is possible and what is impossible, in relation to what is wanted. We always misunderstand, to some degree.
Therefore it's always possible to choose otherwise, all the time. But some things are not possible, even if we think they are, and try to make them happen. Likewise, many things which are possible we never even consider.
1. On decoherence, chaos and everything matters
Youre right to insist that every physical event in principle influences the future state of the universe. But there are three separate claims mixed together here, and they need to be untangled:
Claim A: Every decoherence event must produce a macroscopically different future.*
This is false as a practical claim. Mathematically, you can map a micro-perturbation forward, but most microscopic differences remain confined beneath the systems Lyapunov horizon and are washed out by dissipation and averaging. Saying it mattered in principle is not the same as it produced a distinct, observable macroscopic outcome.
Claim B: If a quantum event didnt cascade to macroscopic difference, then it didnt happen.
This is a category error. An events occurrence is not defined by whether it produces long-range, observable divergence in weather on Mars. Decoherence can and does happen locally without producing macroscopic differences that survive coarse-graining. To deny the event happened because it didnt alter the weather is to adopt a peculiar, counterfactual definition of happened that isnt used in physics.
Claim C: Because chaotic systems amplify differences, microscopic quantum noise always matters.
Chaos gives sensitivity to initial conditions, not guaranteed macroscopic divergence from every tiny perturbation within any fixed observational timescale. Some perturbations are amplified quickly; many are damped or trapped inside subsystems and never produce a new, robust classical structure. So yes, everything is part of the state functionally, but that does not imply practical, observable macroscopic branching for every microscopic event.
2. On ensemble forecasting and pragmatic unpredictability
Ensemble weather models show that small perturbations grow and forecasts diverge over days to weeks. That demonstrates sensitivity, not an omnipresent quantum-to-macroscopic channel that we can exploit or even detect in a controlled way. Ensemble perturbations used in practice are far larger than Planck-scale corrections; their convergence tells us about statistical predictability and model error, it does not prove ontic indeterminacy at the macroscale. In short: models are evidence of chaotic growth, not of routine quantum domination of weather.
3. Interpretations of quantum mechanics - collapse, MWI, Bohmian, etc.
Two helpful distinctions:
Predictive equivalence vs metaphysics.
Most mainstream interpretations (Copenhagen-style pragmatism, Everett/MWI, Bohmian/DBB, GRW-style objective collapse) make the same experimental predictions for standard quantum experiments. Where they differ is metaphysical: whether there is a literal branching reality (MWI), hidden variables (Bohmian), or real collapses (GRW/Penrose). That difference matters philosophically but not experimentally so far.
Determinism vs practical unpredictability.
MWI is best understood as deterministic at the universal wave function level (no collapse), while Bohmian mechanics is deterministic at the level of particle trajectories guided by the wave function. Both can produce the same Born probabilities for observable results. Objective collapse theories, if true, would introduce genuine stochastic events at the fundamental level. Superdeterminism attempts to recover determinism by postulating global correlations that undermine usual independence assumptions - but its philosophically and scientifically unattractive because it erodes the basis for experimental inference.
So: yes, many interpretations are deterministic; some are not. But the existence of multiple empirically-equivalent interpretations means the metaphysical verdict isnt settled by current experiments.
4. Functional robustness (brains, transistors, computation)
Absolutely: brains and silicon devices exploit enormous redundancy and averaging to achieve robust classical behaviour despite quantum microphysics. That robustness is precisely why we can treat neurons as implementing computations without invoking exotic quantum effects. Inputs and boundary conditions matter: if an input to a brain were influenced by a huge amplification of a quantum event, your choices could track that influence, but thats a contingent physical story, not a metaphysical proof of libertarian free will.
5. About happening, counterfactuals and responsibility
Two related points:
Happening and counterfactual dependence.
Whether an event happened should not be defined by whether it caused a macroscopic divergence millions of miles away. Physics generally treats events as happening if they leave local, causal traces (entanglement, records, thermodynamic irreversibility), not by whether they produce globally visible differences across light-years.
Responsibility and determinism.
Even if one accepts a deterministic physical description (whether classical or quantum-deterministic under MWI or Bohmian), that does not automatically dissolve ordinary moral responsibility. Thats the compatibilist position: responsibility depends on capacities, reasons-responsiveness, and the appropriate psychological relations, not on metaphysical indeterminism. Saying my decision was set at the Big Bang is metaphysically dramatic but doesnt change whether you deliberated, had conscious intentions, and acted for your reason(s) - which are precisely the things our ethics and law respond to.
6. About pondering and the illusion of choice
Youre right to resist the crude conclusion that determinism makes choice an illusion. Choice is a process that unfolds over time; it can be broken into sub-choices and revisions. Whether decisions are determined or involve ontic randomness does not by itself answer whether they were genuinely yours. If you deliberated, weighed reasons, and acted from those deliberations, we rightly treat that as agency. Randomness doesnt create agency; reasons and responsiveness do.
We shouldnt conflate three different claims: (A) that micro events in principle influence the universal state; (B) that such influence routinely produces distinct, observable macroscopic outcomes; and (C) that metaphysical determinism therefore undermines agency. In practice, decoherence + dissipation + coarse-graining mean most quantum perturbations dont make detectable macroscopic differences. Interpretations of quantum mechanics disagree about metaphysics but agree on predictions. And finally, even in a deterministic physical world, agency and moral responsibility can still be meaningful because they hinge on capacities, reasons, and psychological continuity, not on metaphysical indeterminism.
Yes, I know it isn't a true illusion. I said it's a "functional illusion", meaning that since the chocolate conclusion was set at the Big Bang (as you noted), no amount of pondering vanilla was going to result in it's selection, or at least as you correctly noted at the mind state just before the pondering started. Thus while we all agree pondering occurs, as I mentioned, folks disagree whether both sides of the internal argument can result in chocolate or vanilla on one hand or always chocolate on the other.
A distinction without importance since in reality there is no practical difference. My advice: choose the option that sits best with you worldview and move on (to questions that can actually make a difference here on planet Earth).
None of what I posted about macroscopic differences is 'in principle'. It's very much in practice, and differences don't remain contained. All such events are beneath any systems Lyapunov horizon and thus take at least that much time to show up as macroscopic differences.
That claim presumes the principle of counterfactual definiteness (PCD) is false, which it is in almost every interpretation. But given that principle, the claim is false. I said as much in prior posts. It cascading into a macroscopic difference is way different than the difference being observed, which is of course impossible. Nobody can observe both the live and dead cat.
So the quantum event doesn't technically alter the weather since that wording implies there was one base weather that would have otherwise been. No, each event is a critical part of the cause of any sufficiently distant weather state, a very different claim than 'alters'.
I think I agree with this one, with 'always' being replaced by 'always to a lot of decimal places'.
Sort of. Imagine something tiny annihilating into radiation that ends up in deep space, never hitting anything. Also the tiny thing, had it not died like that, would also never have interacted with anything else. That's an example of that 'trapped', but it's also an example of an event that never happened in the absence of PCD.
Quoting Truth SeekerCorrect. None of those models run at quantum scale precision. The input data is more like data points that are kilometers apart, not nanometers apart.
More precision would be nice, but data gathering is limited and small scale differences (molecular?) make no significant difference in just the 10 days these models are good for.
If there are any interpretations that make different predictions, then either the interpretation is wrong, or QM is.
Just so. This is why when you take a graduate level course in quantum mechanics, they might spend a day on interpretations, but it being philosophy, it has no scientific value. The course teaches theory, not philosophy. The determinism debate is also philosophy.
The bit I said about some events never happening? That's philosophy. Empirically, whether it happened or not is indistinguishable, so it isn't part of theory.
Something like that. The wave function has multiple solutions, so DBB needs more than just that to guide particles to one outcome.
Quoting Truth SeekerMWI is deterministic, but not classical. There's no 'you' with a meaningful identity in that view. Responsibility is a classical concept and requires a pragmatic classical view of identity, regardless of interpretations of choice.
This is not contradictory. The pragmatic part of me believes all sorts of things that the rational side of me knows is wrong. I would not be fit were the case to be otherwise. Hence my being responsible for my choices.
I would have said that it depends on the entity being held responsible being the same entity making the choice. Determinism just doesn't factor at all into that definition.
Compatibilism is a bit different. It asserts free will in the face of determinism. I don't, but it depends on one's definition of free will. I don't think I have free will as typically defined, but that in no way relieves me of moral responsibility since I'm still making my own choices. So I don't label myself a compatibilist.
Yes. My opinion is that my decision was not at all set at the big bang, but that just means I don't buy into DBB, probably the only interpretation that suggests that.
We seem to be on the same page.
I'd even argue that none of them make detectable macroscopic differences. I mean, I measure an atom decay. Great, but I don't have a not-decay state to compare it with, so there's no 'difference'. I can imagine that other state since it is pretty simple, but I cannot imagine the evolution of that real and imagined state into a future state of a planet a year hence.
Quoting LuckyRSee just above, where only DBB suggests that chocolate choice was set at the big bang. DBB should stand for 'Da Big Bang'. Chicago folks would like that.
I think it's all in how you frame the telling of the story. Proponents of 'vanilla being possibly chosen' would frame the story in such terms. Yea, you could have picked that, but you didn't, didja? If you had, you'd still ponder if you could have chosen chocolate.
Yes, and deal with the consequences. It's pretty easy to falsify the 'not responsible' stance since if one wasn't to be held responsible, different choices would be made. That means responsibility serves a purpose regardless of your stance.
Quoting ProtagoranSocratist
I'd call it marsupicide
Quoting Metaphysician UndercoverEventually one much act on the choice, irrevocably. You debate committing murder, but once the trigger is pulled, there's no doing otherwise. I suppose if you choose not to do it, the option remains open for quite some time.
The vanilla/chocolate debate at the ice cream shop. Exactly how late can one change one's mind before it's too late? We played a game like that with my 1 year old at a restaurant. He was feeding himself stuff from his plate with a spoon. He really like crab leg bits thrown on his plate and would eat those first. Game was to see how far we could get him to choose to eat something else, and still bail out because a crab bit was presented. I won the game when I caused an abort with the spoon already fully in his mouth. Imagine the cheering at the table, causing weird looks from others.
We're easily entertained over here.
Yes, that's physics getting in the way of free will. I cannot get out of this jail because physics compels me to stay here. Nobody can do everything they want to.
Yes, that's what it means for there to be a choice. I'd argue that such choice is not always possible. Sometimes only one path is open. Sometimes not even that. Vanilla or chocolate? Well, there's a power outage at the softserve shop, so as Gene Wilder put it: You get Nothing.
or in other words, you're in a state of relative inertia: you know getting out would be hard, you know the charge isn't that severe (and don't want the extra punishment), so you sit there until someone says you can go. It's mild fear mixed with resignation.
However, in the other scenario among many, energy and angst compel you to get out because you see an opening, which is arguably still not anything you have control over...
It's a lot more precise than how you make it out. Imagine, the assassin sights the target. The window of opportunity is short, and the decision must be made quickly because the target moves on. So as much as the option remains, even after deciding not to pull the trigger, it would all have to be recalculated, and in reality would be a different option.
Consider firing a rocket to the moon. Everything is calculated to the exact liftoff time, and there's a small window. If there is a problem and the window is missed, everything has to be refigured. In general, and in words, it's refigured as the same option, "firing a rocket to the moon", but since it's refigured under different circumstances, it's not really the same option, just the same type of action under different conditions.
Quoting noAxioms
I think there is reverse psychology which comes into play here. So long as one does not pull the trigger, we can always consider doing so at a later time. But once the trigger is pulled that cannot be reversed. So, the psychology is that it is universally better not to act unless one is quite certain of success. The rocket cannot be retrieved after it's fired, so be sure of success before firing. However, if it is not fired, there will be many opportunities of the same type, therefore hold on until you're sure.
Your son got the punishment of reverse psychology. You pushed him toward failure, by inciting him to pull the trigger on something other than the best situation. Then he was embarrassed by jumping the gun, rather than patiently waiting, having to spit it out. That's why patience is a virtue.
Quoting noAxioms
How could there ever be only one path open? The future is always full of possibilities. And by being patient and not pulling the trigger we allow the possibilities to persist. But even falsely pulling the trigger only results in some kind of embarrassment. So if you pull the trigger and you're on the road to the softserve shop when the power goes out, you can turn around and go somewhere else. And even after the assassin fires the shot, he could fire another and another.
I believe the lesson is, that when you make the act, you put things in motion which inevitably restrict your future acts, unless your act is designed to increase your freedom, and it is successful. So the first principle is that nonaction maintains freedom. The second principle is that you might act in a way which would increase your freedom, but you need to be certain, because failure will backfire and lessen it.
On Claim A, I accept that Nortons Dome demonstrates classical indeterminism under non-Lipschitz conditions, though its a purely mathematical curiosity. In any physically realizable system governed by continuous differentiable dynamics, each decoherence event still alters the global quantum state. Even if that alteration remains thermodynamically undetectable within a local Lyapunov horizon, it nevertheless yields a distinct universal configuration in principle. My claim concerns this ontological divergence, not its empirical detectability.
On Claim B, youre right that the assertion depends on whether one accepts counterfactual definiteness. I was speaking from an Everett-style, decoherence-based ontology where every event contributes to a definite branch of the universal wave function. Under that framework, an event that leaves no macroscopic trace still differentiates the overall state of the universe. The difference need not be observable to be real.
For Claim C, Id refine always matters as follows: every quantum perturbation modifies the total wave function, but only some of those perturbations are amplified within our causal region into new classical structures. Others disperse or remain dynamically isolated, but they still shape the global state. Trapped and amplified are perspectival distinctions within one continuous evolution.
On determinism and responsibility, I think we share the pragmatic view. Determinism doesnt abolish agency; it merely redefines it as a complex causal process rather than an uncaused power. Responsibility survives as a social and ethical convention that regulates behaviour within the deterministic flow. To borrow my own GENE model language, deliberation and choice are emergent computations of Genes, Environments, Nutrients, and Experiences - not exemptions from causality but expressions of it.
So when I speak of choice or agency, I mean the real-time process of deliberation that precedes action, not a metaphysical ability to have done otherwise. The phenomenology of choice remains intact, even if the universes total state never could have evolved differently.
We apparently are not going to agree on this point.
We agree on the responsibility point. Of note: Under Everett again, the universe can and does evolve in all possible outcomes, which includes choosing differently, not choosing at all, and of course not even existing to choose.
Quoting Metaphysician UndercoverSure, one can spin a drawn out choice (to go to the moon, good example) as a series of more immediate choices that have temporal windows. The choice ends when there's somebody on the moon, at which point it's hard to change your mind about doing so anymore.
That works in some situations, but a not in a fair percentage of them. Such uncertainty prevents some people from ever getting married. Sometimes this is a good thing, but often not. Don't choose poorly, but also don't reject good choices for fear of lack of 'success'.
War is another example where that psychology is a losing one. Risk taking is part of how things are best done.
He did? He got crab legs and loved it. He also liked the other food he was eating, so at no point was he 'punished'.
He was 1, with no concept of embarassment yet. He was unaware of a game being played in his court. He never spit anything out. That would have been even a better score than spoon-abort, already in, but not already 'unloaded'.
Since I'm quoting movies, I remember Gandalf saying "now there is but one choice" once the entrance to Moria collapsed after they had entered. Go forth into the mine was the only option remaining. They hadn't the resources to dig their way out.
Similar to a game of Chess or Reversi. Any move restricts possible future positions to those which follow from the new current state. In Reversi in particular, playing to maximize your freedom and minimize the opponent's freedom is definitely a winning strategy. Took me 8 years to figure that out.
Not always, and not even particularly often. Not looking for food definitely curtails eventual freedom.
Quoting ProtagoranSocratistYou many not have too much control over the appearance of opportunities to escape jail, but if one presents itself, you do have control to choose to act or not on it. It would also be foolish not to consider the positive and negative consequences of the various options, but some choice come fast enough that such rational weighing of options is not, well, an option.
Look what you are saying. It can just be turned around. Not getting married was the mistaken choice which shouldn't have been made. Rejecting good choices is making a poor choice. So it's just a matter of what descriptive words are used.
Risk is never the best option. It is often unavoidable, but then the best option is the one which reduces the risk. See it's just a matter of wording. And the reason why it's confusing is because we are leaving out a key aspect. Success is in relation to a goal. So "unavoidable" is determined in relation to the goal. Once we frame things as being in relation to a goal, the whole perspective is variable, depending on the goal.
Quoting noAxioms
A child does not need to understand the concept of embarrassment, to be embarrassed. "Cheering at the table" indicates that he was most likely embarrassed, even at 1.
Quoting noAxioms
I don't agree with this. "Looking for food" implies a restriction that the person is looking for something which is known to be food. This restricts the person from eating all sorts of things which may actually be good food, yet not known to be "food" to the person.
The point being that action requires choice, and choice restricts the person's freedom to select all the other possibilities. If a hamburger is the only thing the person knows to be food, then "looking for food" is a significant restriction.
Look back at the moon example. "Going to the moon" required all those choices, and each one excluded all the other possibilities. Therefore there was a whole lot of other things which could have been done in that time, with those resources, but "going to the moon" was the chosen goal, and this negated all those other possibilities.
Youre right that Everett dispenses with counterfactual definiteness: only the total wave function is real, while definite outcomes are branch-relative. However, if every decoherence event differentiates the universal state vector, then by definition, each unmeasured quantum fluctuation still contributes to the branching structure of the multiverse. The fact that we only observe a subset of classical branches doesnt mean the rest lack existence; it only means they are decohered beyond causal contact with us.
So when I say an event that leaves no macroscopic trace still differentiates the overall state, I mean that decoherence is ontologically generative - the universes global wave function encodes every microscopic difference, even those never amplified to our classical level. From that global perspective, nothing fails to happen; it merely fails to be observable within our branch.
As for responsibility, I agree that phenomenology remains intact. Even if the total state-space evolves deterministically, subjective deliberation and outcome differentiation are still structurally real within each branch - enough to preserve the experiential grammar of choice, if not libertarian freedom.
The terminology grates with me, but more or less I agree. The universal state vector cannot differentiate since there is but only one of them, so it evolves over time, just like the universal wave function. It doesn't collapse, which I think would constitute 'differentiation'.
Everett does not suggest separate 'branches' that have any kind of defined state. Such would be a counterfactual. So yea, Everett says that the universal wave function 'exists', period. It's a realist position, and it is that realism that is my primary beef with the view since it doesn't seem justified.
Fine, but the only ones unamplified are the ones permanently in superposition relative to some classical state, such as the dead/live cat in a box never opened (said classical state).
Quoting Truth SeekerCareful. With the exception of Wigner interpretation (a solipsistic one), nothing in quantum mechanics is observer dependent. Observation plays no special role.
As for responsibility, I agree that phenomenology remains intact. Even if the total state-space evolves deterministically, subjective deliberation and outcome differentiation are still structurally real within each branch - enough to preserve the experiential grammar of choice, if not libertarian freedom.[/quote]
Agree with that, and even more, since your statement seems confined to MWI assumptions, but the conclusion is interpretation independent.
As for my opinion of Libertarian free will, that's just a term describing external agency, with no demonstration of any greater freedom than internal agency. Coming down with Rabies is an example of Libertarian free will. The agency is suddenly something other than yours, and Rabies (the external agent) now has the free will instead of you, and it compels you to bite people, and then Rabies becomes responsible for those assaults, not you.
Quoting Metaphysician UndercoverGetting married is like pulling the trigger. One can put off that choice indefinitely, but once done, it's done.
I used it as a counter for your assertion of 'certainty of success', and 'minimize risk'. Getting married is a risk (something you assert to never be the best option), even ones that seem a very good match. Not getting married is usually not the best option. Sure, it is for some people. I have 3 kids, and only one marriage is expected, thus countering my 'usually' assertion.
Quoting Metaphysician UndercoverOne never had freedom to select multiple options. Sure, you can have both vanilla and chocolate, but that's just a single third option. There's no having cake and eating it, so to speak. You have choice because you can select any valid option, but you can't choose X and also not X.
Somehow I'm guessing you meant something else by that comment, but I cannot figure out what else it might mean.
OK, but I don't know how this became a discussion about ignorance of what is food. The comment was in response to your assertion of "the first principle is that nonaction maintains freedom", and my example of nonaction (and not ignorance) will cause among other things starvation, which will likely curtail freedom.
I think this is a false example. The option is usually whether or not to marry a specific person, not whether or not to get married in general. And, if you're not certain about the person, you're probably not in love, and you should not go ahead at that time. And if the question is whether or not to get married in general, you should not go ahead with that, until you are certain that it is the right thing.
The difference between the way you and I are looking at this, is that you are making some kind of 'objective' statement "getting married is a risk", and from that you are saying that risk is good. But from that 'objective' perspective, every choice is a risk, so of course risk must be good or else all choices would be bad. But that's not what I am talking about. I am talking about looking from the perspective of the person making the choice. And from that perspective, if the act is risky it's better for the person to wait until they have more confidence. Often the stakes are very low, and risk is simply not taken into consideration. But as the stakes get higher, considering the risk gets more and more important.
Quoting noAxioms
Sorry, I didn't make myself clear. I should have said freedom to select from all the other possibilities. So for example if there is twenty options, then the person has the freedom to select from twenty options. However, once the choice is made you restrict your freedom to select the other nineteen. That's what I meant, making a choice restricts your freedom. If you have the freedom to choose X or not X, then choosing X restricts your freedom to choose not X. Making a choice always restricts one's freedom.
Quoting noAxioms
Your conclusion is based on the assumption that "starvation will likely curtail freedom". Those who believe that being chained to the body is a restriction to the soul would argue otherwise. So that is just a reflection of your metaphysical preference. My principle, that non-action maintains freedom is based in the logic explained above.
When I said the universal state vector differentiates, I didnt mean that it splits or collapses in any literal sense. I agree that the universal wave function evolves unitarily. What I meant is that decoherence continuously factorizes the total state into dynamically autonomous subspaces. The evolution is singular, but its structure becomes increasingly partitioned as interference terms vanish. In that descriptive sense, decoherence is ontologically generative - it produces new relational structure within the universal state, even if not new worlds as discrete entities.
Youre right that Everett himself didnt speak of sharply defined branches, and I share your caution about reifying them. Still, decoherence does create stable quasi-classical sectors whose internal histories no longer interfere. Calling them branches is shorthand for these dynamically independent histories. So when I said that an event that leaves no macroscopic trace still differentiates the overall state, I meant that every quantum fluctuation alters the total wave functions structure, even if those alterations remain forever unamplified from our classical perspective.
I also agree that quantum mechanics is not observer-dependent in the Wigner sense - nothing special happens because a conscious agent looks. My use of observer was relational, not Cartesian: any subsystem that records or correlates information functions as an observer relative to another. Within that relational framework, phenomenological perspectives arise naturally from entanglement structure, not metaphysical privilege.
Regarding freedom and responsibility: yes, phenomenology remains intact. Even if the total evolution is deterministic, each branch still contains agents whose deliberative architectures causally mediate outcomes within that branch. That structure grounds a compatibilist sense of agency: one can be determined and yet meaningfully responsible insofar as choices flow from ones own evaluative processes. Libertarian freedom, by contrast, would require causal independence from ones own nature - an incoherent notion. In your rabies analogy, the external pathogen literally overrides the persons cognitive structure, which is why we no longer ascribe responsibility. The contrast actually illustrates compatibilism rather than libertarianism.
Stepping back, the parallel between branching and agency seems telling: both involve emergent autonomy within an underlying deterministic totality. The global states evolution may be seamless, yet locally it yields distinct, causally closed structures - worlds in one case, deliberating agents in the other. In both, the differentiation is real enough to sustain the lived grammar of choice, even if metaphysical freedom never enters the picture.
In my own framework - the GENE Causal Self Model - I interpret such autonomy through the interplay of Genes, Environments, Nutrients, and Experiences. Each agents decisions are determined by the evolving configuration of these factors, yet within that causal web, reflective self-organization still emerges. Much like decoherent branches of the wave function, selves are dynamically distinct yet law-governed substructures of a single evolving whole.
This is a hypothetical example. Preventing any measurement like that is essentially impossible. Sure, they've done it for barely visible objects under conditions that would kill any lifeform, and only for nanoseconds, but Schrodinger's box has actually been done. They used a tuning fork instead of a cat.
Quoting Truth SeekerYes, This is closer to my relational preference in interpretations. I use a relational definition of ontology, as opposed to a realist one like MWI does.
Yea, it was DeWitt who first did that, and then backed off somewhat from that description.
Fine. Just making sure. I tend to use the term 'measurement' instead of 'observation', but even that term has overtones of say intent. 'Interaction'?
There are so many that I consider to be competent thinkers that presume that metaphysical privilege.
Quoting Truth SeekerI wouldn't say that since 'one's own nature' becomes this 2nd metaphysical causal process, and thus not intedependence of one's own nature. Independence of one's physical nature perhaps, but is there even a physical nature if that kind of thing is how it all works?
Isn't that exactly what the dualists suggest is going on? Of course, a dualist with rabies would have the physical effected, and somehow the mental component also affected, at least rendered less efficacious. Tri-ism? Three agents (physical, mental, and pathogen) all fighting for control.
I actually do report a form of it. I am occasionally afflicted with a form of epiphenomenalism where I am awake but cut off from most physical causality. I wake up from this condition, and only with an extreme mental effort can I push through my will an move something (preferably turn my head). It's called sleep paralysis, and the short of it is that your motor functions turn off when you sleep. If this mechanism is faulty, you sleepwalk. If it fails to turn on the juice when you wake up, it's sleep paralysis. I guess I don't have to worry too much about ever sleep walking.
Agree up to here.
I don't think human choice has anything to do with differentiation since under any other interpretation where there isn't the kind of differentiation you get under MWI, the exact same choices and responsibility results. The only difference is that there are not other worlds split of sufficiently long ago that those tiny difference have grown into macroscopic difference large enough to cause different choices to be made, and my choice and responsibility has nothing to do with what those other versions are choosing.
Quoting Metaphysician UndercoverI'm not talking about a choice to not get married. I'm talking about making a choice to commit to marriage now (propose, or accept a proposal), coupled with the subsequent actual getting married, which is the trigger being pulled: can't hypothetically undo that. Doing so would be presumably to one person.
Deciding to get married in general (with perhaps no specific prospect currently in mind) is not like pulling the trigger since one can always change one's mind about such a decision.
Few, arguably none, are ever certain of it being the correct choice. Plenty of people have attested to be certain about it, only to regret the decision later on. I'm lucky. Married over 40 years now. All my siblings are on spouse #2. The one that waited the longest to be 'most certain' ended in cheating (both parties) and divorce.
There's overtones of 'marriage is good' there, which I don't agree is always true. But each statement in isolation, yes I'm saying that. I have better examples of 'risk is good'. Marriage is my example of a decision of a trigger pull, something you can't undo.
Disagree, for reasons and examples I've already posted. There are times when risk is high, but would likely get higher with time, and so confidence is likely to drop if you wait.
Take saving people from a burning building. You can risk your life and charge in there and grab the baby, or you can wait until the fire trucks get the fire more under control so your safety is more assured. That's a hard decision, and there are cases where each option is the best one.
Great. Agree. There are those that say that 19 of those options are not available for selection because it is the 20th you want, even if the other 19 are close contenders.
Under a pull-trigger sort of situation, yes. In other cases, one can change one's mind. We've been getting into the nitty-gritty about this latter case: "Was a decision really made if the option to change your mind is still open?".
The former restricts one's freedom. The latter does as well, but not nearly as much.
Sometimes, per the above.
Anyway, I stand more clarified about your statement of making a choice curtailing freedom.
On factorization, I accept your refinement: decoherence doesnt magically bifurcate the universal state into sealed compartments but rather entangles subsystems such that coherence between them becomes practically lost. When I said continuously factorizes the total state, I meant this relational entanglement structure - the effective tensor-product decomposition that yields dynamically autonomous components relative to the measurement context. So yes, the split is local and conditional, not global. I like your phrasing that only the systems that have measured the decohered state become entangled with it. Thats a good corrective to the loose Everettian imagery.
I share your relational preference over full-blown realism. My ontologically generative phrasing was intended in that same spirit: the ontology is not a collection of separate universes but a web of ever-evolving relational configurations. The structure of relations changes - new entanglement correlations come into being - even though the global amplitude distribution remains one evolving unity. So perhaps structurally generative would be the better expression.
Regarding observer versus interaction, I agree completely. I used observer phenomenologically, but interaction avoids the mentalistic overtones. Im wary of language that suggests intent or consciousness as a special causal category; it risks re-smuggling the old metaphysical privilege that quantum theory works so hard to dissolve.
On free will, I think we converge on compatibilism but may use slightly different vocabularies. I take your point that ones own nature could itself be construed as a second metaphysical causal chain, but I meant it more modestly: the organisms integrated causal structure - its neural and psychological architecture - as distinct from an external intruder like the rabies virus. The point is not that one becomes independent of causality, but that causal efficacy remains internal to the systems evaluative dynamics. Thats why the rabies example marks the boundary between responsibility and compulsion. Dualists, as you say, would complicate that further, perhaps imagining the pathogen interfering with both the physical and the mental tracks, but I see that as multiplying mysteries rather than explaining anything.
Your description of sleep paralysis is fascinating - its a vivid phenomenological example of partial causal decoupling: consciousness active, motor output suppressed. From a naturalistic angle, it actually illustrates how finely tuned the causal layers of agency are: when one channel is interrupted, agency becomes experiential but not performative. Its a transient epiphenomenal pocket, not a metaphysical clue, but I can see why it feels uncanny.
As for your final point - that human choice doesnt depend on branching - I fully agree. The experiential grammar of choice would be the same in any interpretation, whether Everettian, Bohmian, or GRW. My comparison between branching and agency was metaphorical: both involve local differentiation within a globally deterministic process. The analogy isnt meant to make agency depend on branching, only to highlight the structural parallel between emergent autonomy in physics and in psychology.
In that sense, I see compatibilist freedom and relational quantum ontology as reflections of the same deeper pattern: causal closure at the global level, emergent quasi-autonomy at the local. In my GENE Causal Self Model, those quasi-autonomous patterns are constituted by the interaction of Genes, Environments, Nutrients, and Experiences - a biological analogue to decoherences relational structure. Both describe complex systems that remain causally determined yet exhibit self-organizing agency through internal feedback loops. Determinism and autonomy, far from being opposites, are two perspectives on the same relational process.
I admit, I could never frame "risk" with a definition which would make it universally bad. But in thinking about it I see that there is quite a number of different ways to relate to risk. There is risk of failure. There is risk that even with success in obtaining the goal, it wasn't the best goal. There is also risk that proceeding toward one goal will produce failure relative to another. So many different types of risk.