Determinism

Post Reply New Topic

It might sound nit-picky but I said 'not completely' reducible to the preceding stages. Consciousness is dependent on the functioning of the brain, but psychology is an emergent property that you will never be able to account for entirely by the firing of synapses in the brain. Psychological states can also infuluence brain states.

Science is deterministic and reductive in its methodology because it has to be. It looks for causes and seeks to predict effects. The success of the scientific method, I think, leads logically minded people to believe that everything in the universe works along the same lines, but this isn't necessarily the case. Science looks for solvable problems and has realy only recently tried to tackle complexity.

Popper first makes the argument against determinism by saying that he does not believe that the creation of a new work, such as Mozarts G minor symphony, can be predicted in all its details by a physicist, or a physiologist who study Mozarts body and his brain and his environment. To believe that it can seems intuitively absurd, he says, and then takes the arguments on.

You have presented no valid argument, you continually present arguments petitio principii. Your premises include your proposition. Why do you say psychology is unpredictable. The only two reasons we cannot predict such things with certainty are Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and limited computing ability.




Exactly, if everything observable follows cause and effect to the limits of observable accuracy, it is only reasonable to assume that which cannot be also follows cause and effect.



He goes on gut feeling to make a limited argument, no one disagrees that a physicist could never predict a Mozart symphony, but that's because no physicist has any relevant data and no physicist has any where near enough computational ability.



So does entanglment and a thousand other more well proved theories. Intuition proves nothing.

Tim_p, you are missing the point here, I am making statements, not proposing arguments. Since I am convinced by Popper's reasoning I am more often stating conclusions rather than reproducing passages where he argues in great detail against determinism, scientific, religious and metaphysical. I have assumed that anyone who finds these statements sufficiently interesting will read up on the detail of his arguments

http://www.eeng.dcu.ie/~tkpw/ (The Karl Popper Web, might be a good place to start)

rather than expecting me to reproduce them verbatim here. However, I will have a go at using his reasoning against your statments since you are obviously as keen to continue the debate as I am. I will get back to you on this. One thing, don't make the mistake of thinking that Popper is somehow anti-science. He is arguably the twentieth centuries greatest scientific philosopher, who debated with Einstein, among others. His theory of scientific progress, Evolutionary Epistemology, has had a profound influence. I hope not to misrepresent or misunderstand his arguments.

First off though, you could also be accused of arguing 'petitio principii' (I had to look that one up),
especially here:

This proves nothing, and has no definition of determinism to back it up. You have restated this position



many times without justification. It is an oxymoron. Perhaps we shall have to define stricter terms to carry the argument on.

Jetson wrote:



I agree, and this could be something you might say is 'loosely deterministic' as opposed to 'scientificaly deterministic.' Obviously historical events have causes, but when we are dealing with large amounts of people, each with their own theory of mind, the factors are uncountable and history can only, in practise, discover so many. So it continually revises its perspectives. This is not an argument against a more strictly defined determinism, I know, but I will have to go into that some other time.

For now, perhaps we could agree on a definition of 'scientific determinism'? This is what I propose:

That the entire history of the universe is strictly governed by its initial conditions. Each subsequent event is a direct result of this intial cause or set of causes or condtions, and can - in principle if not in practise - be reduced to them.

I think this closely follows what you have argued before. One thing, can we keep God out of this part of the debate? I only say this because we have cross threaded and in the other thread I already said words to the effect that with an omnipotent god, all bets are off, since he can have it any which way he likes, being omnipotent. Yes that is an argument petitio pricipii.

One last thing, many well founded scientific theories start out with hunches and intuition. The important thing is not how they begin, but how they are subsequently defined and what evidence can be found in their favour.

That was not a valid formal argument, nor was it intended to be, I meant to give an example of the coexsistance of determinism and free-will to make an intuitive grasp easier.


Just because I did not define determinism does not invalidate my argument, it is a normal english word and does not demand a definition, though it would perhaps be useful.



Very good, I accept your definition. I wonder if you would be willing to take a stab at defining free-will? I'm having trouble writing a complete definition without being too verbose.



That was exactly my point, I did not say intuition was usless, I said intuition proves nothing

P.S.

After this one post I will refrain from mentioning God again.

I do not agree that my argument was flawed petito principii. In this case I definitely should have defined the terms.

By omniscience I mean the knowledge of all that is (in my argument, all that was at the beginning of time), not the knowledge of all the is, was and will be.
And by omnipotence I mean infinite power withing the bounds of logic to create the universe, after creation also limited to the laws of physics, whether that limit is inherent or voluntary.[/i]

Experiments prove indepedant intelligence/will really does operate in the world. just by thinking about a particle will influence its actions before you do anything to it.

Tim_p,

The New Oxford Dictionary of English definitions of: (please note that bold in these quotes belong to the dictionary, not me)



The Collins English Dictionary actually calls on a comparison of the two to help in their definition:



Following the first definition of free will above, the version of 'scientific determinsm' you have accepted means that all human actions are of necessity constrained by the intitial conditions of our system (the universe).

In the second defintion, I note that the dictionary says ' ....the apparent human abitlity to make decisions that are not externally determined.'

If you accept our definition of 'scientific determinism' as reality, free will is indeed an illusion. All human actions are externally determined since they can be reduced to causes - including those in the environment and those inside the brain of the actor at the time of his apparent 'choice event' - which existed long before he did.

Since I agree would agree with the Collins dictionary definition it is incumbent upon you to define a 'free will' that can co-exist alongside 'scientific determinsm,' without contradicting or negating it, or simply saying that the illusion of free will is as good as the thing itself. Feel free to quote anyone you like.

look at it this way, there is not one timeline but an infinite number of variations, everthing that can happen does. every possible choice does occur, but where you end up is up to you . this make its so that free will and destiny are not contricitory. God would know everything that would ever happen and you could still chose what would happen to you

And now we reach the crux of my argument.
In the strictest reading of the Collins definition free-will cannot possibly produce anything other than random data with no connection to the outside world, it takes the influence of the outside world to produce any data correlated with it.
In the looser (and I think intended) form, Collins' definition of free-will does not exclude determinism. If one accepts scientific determinism as you defined earlier, one must agree that as it is a physical structure, determinism applies to the human brain. One's brain, and it follows one's mind, are determined by the initial conditions of the universe. Yet one's thoughts are still one's own, created entirely in one's mind with no external control, by Collins definition one has free-will. There is no contradiction, I beg you to try and find one.

Daniel Dennet has a book out call "Feedom Evolves". I've read about half of it, and it has been an interesting read so far if any of you want to check it out. It deals very thoroughly with the topics being discussed here.

Tim_p,

agreed...



in the version of determinism we agreed to debate, agreed.....



....'created entirely in ones own mind with no external control' ? But you have agreed that the internal conditions of the actors brain have been externally determined - or controlled, if you like - by conditions that existed long before, at the very beginning of the universe.

Igor wrote:



There is your contradiction. You cannot be said to have - or to be able to excercise - free will, if your thoughts, states of mind and decisions were determined before you existed.

I remember hearing a Duelistic theory that "I exist but no-one else exists"
How about this, Fate rules my life but does not rule anyone elses lives.

Ok, so we agree up until this point.

The mind is formed by what came before it, but at any one point what came before it was an earlier state of that same mind, once created the mind controls itself, though it is heavily influenced by the information it receives (sight, hearing, etcetera).

Either you must accept a looser definition of free-will or none at all. For free-will to exist as Collins' defined it, one's thoughts (and therefore one's actions) must have no correlation with the world, for correlation to exist there must be influence and where there is influence there is some level of determination. All thoughts and actions should appear totally random. Clearly they are not, if they were I would not be speaking to you right now; but your words influenced my mind, they caused me to think, and now prompted by this external influence I am replying.

If you accept a looser definition there is no contradiction.

The "illusion" of free-will is not only as good as the thing it self, it is the thing itself. Our wills are as free as anything ever can be. Do you think that minds controlled by utterly random systems with no connection to anything outside the mind are freer than minds with a predetermined structure able to produce useful information and not just irregular unpredictable noise?

Tim_p

you seem to have forgotten which side of the debate I am on, so I will remind you. It is my contention that:

1. Free will as defined by Collins cannot exist in a system as rigidly determined as the one we agreed to debate.
2. This rigidly defined 'scientific determinism' does not describe the real universe.

It is you that believes in this rigidly deterministic system, not me. And it is you that must accept a less rigidly defined idea of determinism if any kind of 'free will' worth the name can be said to exist in reality. You have not answered the contradiction. You wrote:

...which contradicts your latest statement that:



...and your earlier:



....here you accord a special status to the mind, 'ones own thoughts,' which is meaningless. Are you saying that they exist independantly of the rest of the universe? How so?

Within the terms of 'scientific determinism' your thoughts are nothing more than the firing of synapses in the brain, and this, being a physical system, is predetermined, not by any earlier state of mind, which can only be one link in the chain of causation, but - at the risk of repeating myself, and as you have already agreed - by the initial conditions of the universe. Any earlier state of mind was also predetermined and so on.

You have done here what I have seen you do with other people who have pointed out the contradiction in your argument: you defend a rigidly defined determinism until someone challenges you to show how free will can exist within it. At this point you move to a much less rigidly defined definition

...as here:



....and claim that it is the same thing. It is not.

On this side of the pond we call that 'moving the goal posts.'

IMHO the universe is deterministic... if we had all the information of all the subatomic particles and energy fields and photons, etc.. we could predict with 100% accuracy the fate of the universe and also small-scale predictions...

unforttunately to record all this information would require a computer that was OUTSIDE our universe, to avoid influencing the outcome of the universe.

however, just because this is an impossible hurdle, doesn't magically make the universe non-deterministic.. there's no reason to wheel out the god of the gaps.

why cannot computers generate random numbers? they can only generate pseudo-random numbers

Here I am perhaps guilty of poor wording, the problem being that I've already explained my thoughts and can only come up with so many new wordings before they become hideously convoluted. I never wavered from the strict scientific determinism you defined. By "no external control" I mean to say that the mind acts as it should based on it's structure and the effects of accumulated years of data gathering and that it is not forced to behave in any other way.

My statement "but at any one point what came before it was an earlier state of that same mind, once created the mind controls itself" did not contradict determinism in any way. I agree that each earlier state was merely "one link in the chain of causation", I'm pointing out that the predetermination of the mind does not change the fact that it is still the mind making decisions



I did no such thing, if you'll look back, you'll see that as soon as you provided a definition of free-will I said that I could not possibly accept it in such a strict form, and nor can you even though you do not agree with such a strict determinism. The goal is firmly set.

Regardless of your thoughts on determinism, you must accept that free will cannot be completely free, there must be influence from the world or free-will would produce nothing but noise. There is clear logical incompatibility between pure free-will and the world, and I do not think this debate can continue in any useful direction unless we can agree that such strict free-will does not exist.

Either: agree, prove some form of compatibility (which I assure you, cannot be done), or I'm leaving this argument. Please note that I do not intend this as a threat or argumentum ad baculum. I'm quite sure you would not be hurt by my leaving, it would in reality make your argument look better. This is merely a statement of my belief that this argument cannot make any progress in the direction it's going now.