Does chaos theory square classical physics with human agency?

https://aeon.co/essays/does-chaos-theory-square-classical-physics-with-human-agency

by rbanffy • 2 years ago

26 49 2 years ago

Is this not just soft determinism?

I've always felt like soft determinists were just people who really wanted "free will" but couldn't see enough uncertainty in the unexplored realms of physics to see how the universe isn't fully deterministic (if very difficult to simulate or make predictions that match reality beyond a few seconds). So instead they just redefined free will in a "this is fine [room is on fire]" kind of way.

Either the universe is fully deterministic and free will and agency do not exist, and we should be much kinder to people who e.g. commit crimes (they were forced to do it by their brain state, after all).

Or the universe is not fully deterministic, and we are going to eventually find some (or many) fundamental source of non-deterministic behavior.

Now mind you, whether that non-deterministic behavior actually happens in our brains in a way that it provides some kind of metaphorical "door" for our soul, or our true selves, or whatever you might call it, to propagate through meaningfully into our consciousnesses in a way that will make whether we are a sinner or a saint some actual function of whether "we" are "good". Now that remains to be seen.

Wouldn't it be funny if we found that truly non-deterministic behavior happens at the event horizons of black holes, or in the middle of the fusion of a star, or something crazily exotic like that. And definitely doesn't happen at standard temperature and pressure in our brains.

parpfish• 2 years ago

i've never understood why free will fits into discussions about deterministic vs random universes. in either situation, there isn't room for free will -- if things are deterministic your decisions are made by the state of the world at t-1, if things are random your decisions are made by coin flips.

the more i've thought about this over the years, the less clearly i've been able to define what precisely 'free will' would mean in terms of a physical system or causality

mrsilencedogood3• 2 years ago

Agreed, there are to "steps" we need.

First, we need the universe to not literally just be a function of the previous state and the current time.

Second, we need (and I'm quoting myself from above to illustrate what I meant): "some kind of metaphorical "door" for our soul, or our true selves, or whatever you might call it, to propagate through meaningfully into our consciousnesses".

Lacking the first means there's no way for the second to exist. Supposing the first exists, we then need it to provide some kind of way for the "us" that exists outside of physics or as an emergent phenomenon out of the nondeterministic parts of physics to meaningfully shape what our brain's electrical states make us do.

If we have all of that, we finally have the beginnings of a system in which we can start to try to philosophically assign moral designations to actions and people. Which is think is about 50% of the reason people want free will to exist: so we can punish others for their actions.

(And just to clarify, to anyone not familiar with how people usually debate philosophy. It's all about your presupposed axioms. Things you and your partner agree to be true. This kind of discussion is one that presupposes relatively little, so don't think I'm trying to make political claims about how crime shouldn't be punished or whatever. I'm simply saying that if we presuppose only that the universe is not deterministic, that alone doesn't bring us forward enough to start building a system of ethics.)

lupire3• 2 years ago

That's the point. Free will is a metaphysical concept that posits the existence of a soul outside physics.

Randomness in physics is a peephole through which the non physical world can interact with physics. Think of it like a game where you get control the RNG output for some rolls.

AngryData• 2 years ago

Yeah I share the same stance. Im not sure there is even a point in knowing or caring about freewill regardless of whether it exists or not or is just some completely meaningless abstract concept.

At the end of the day, im still going to act like me. From what I can imagine the most knowing the answer could ever accomplish is induce existential crisis in some people.

naasking6• 2 years ago

in either situation, there isn't room for free will -- if things are deterministic your decisions are made by the state of the world at t-1, if things are random your decisions are made by coin flips.

Yes, but what does this have to do with free will as most people understand the term? They want to be responsible for their choices, but this is compatible with a deterministic universe.

jerf• 2 years ago

Yesterday I complained that telepathy is defined solely as a negative, which means that it essentially can't exist because if it is ever found, it will be real, and as such, will have mechanisms and limitations and real characteristics, and therefore it can't be "real telepathy". Because the definition is intrinsically built on negation.

    def isItTelepathy(anything):
        return False

A lot of obfuscatory words are thrown at the definition, but it's what it amounts to.

Or, more fairly, this is not the only definition but it's a very popular one.

Free will has a similar problem. The definition a lot of people want to use is a negative one. It can't involve any predictable process. It can't involve any seen process. And so on. Well, when you feed a definition like the above into logic, you get some pretty broken answers.

Some people do give definitions that can be turned into real answers, but you can detect someone operating on the completely-negative definition by the way they get upset, sometimes even in a moralistic way, at the idea that you might have said something meaningful and insist on pushing their total-negation definition at you again.

There's an interesting conversation to be had on the matter in potentia but it requires so much effort sidelining the people who become offended if you actually proffer a definition and hold to it and perform actual logic on it that it's hardly worth it. So we pretty much get nowhere because we are essentially not allowed by about 80% of the people trying to have the conversation to have a concrete definition at all, not even for a moment, not even "for the sake of argument".

snowwrestler• 2 years ago

The only way to satisfy extreme notions of free will is to introduce supernatural agency, e.g. a soul granted by God. This way your choices are neither physically pre-determined, nor random.

And in fact when you dig deep into discussions with some people, it becomes clear that defending and proselytizing the existence of a soul (or similar supernatural concept) is in fact their goal in discussing free will in the first place. They think it's a useful way to back into their preferred version of spirituality, or they think it's the logical resolution to the contradiction you've highlighted, or maybe both.

card_zero4• 2 years ago

Nah. People who get het up about free will are just making some conceptual error, which I think goes like this;

1. Machines don't have free will.

2. If my brain is explained by conventional physics, it's a mechanism.

3. But I have free will!

4. So there's something wrong with physics.

But the mistake is in step 1, machines can have free will - at least, we do, so QED and STFU.

Why can't free will be deterministic? What does randomness have to do with anything? This is about thought.

joelfried2• 2 years ago

Many would say you can't have free will in a deterministic world because free will is about selecting one option from many. If there is no alternative option -- because the universe is completely determined -- how can you have any choice? You were always going to do exactly what it was previously determined you were always going to do.

awwaiid• 2 years ago

A useful illusion of Free Will is that we can to some degree predict the future state of the world and influence the future state of the world. To make meaningful agent type activity you have to have a world full of causality, in other words --- and to have causality it is awfully nice to have some deterministic properties (or science might not work out so well). So! I for one am a hard-compatiblist. I think that not only is "useful free-will" aka Agency compatible with determinism, I think that determinism is necessary!

(concepts probably stolen or bad copies of Daniel Dennett models)

mrsilencedogood3• 2 years ago

It's clear that huge swathes of physics are deterministic! Or at least anything non-deterministic is on a small-enough order that we can still build rockets and keep clocks on satellites and earth in sync.

And I agree that a world completely free of causality would be a useless world. But I think that a world that is completely closed under physics and completely deterministic isn't compatible with a "free will" that could support a system of ethics, which I think is where a lot of people then want to take the "does free will exist" argument once they figure out the first part. So it's a matter of threading the needle.

lupire3• 2 years ago

Compatibilitism is the the theory that player characters (conscious people)and NPCs (philosophical zombies) are morally equivalent. That the inability to see someone's (even your own!) inner motivating state means that it's equivalent to free will in all practical senses.

In other words, "The difference between theory and practice is that, in theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not", and all the paradox that entails.

card_zero4• 2 years ago

The idea of philosophical zombies has something in common with solipsism, which is where everybody else is a zombie, and hey, maybe the universe is a simulation too. But the argument against this is that if the universe (and its population) is perfectly simulated, then it's exactly equivalent to real, and that means it is real - or the zombie is a real person, if we're just discussing one "perfectly simulated" person. Otherwise, if the simulation is just very very good, we're talking about something less relevant to arguments.

naasking6• 2 years ago

Compatibilitism is the the theory that player characters (conscious people)and NPCs (philosophical zombies) are morally equivalent.

Compatibilism has literally nothing to say about consciousness. It's a completely orthogonal question. There's nothing incoherent about deterministic p-zombies or non-deterministic p-zombies, nor is there anything incoherent about deterministic conscious people or non-deterministic conscious people.

mannykannot2• 2 years ago

Either the universe is fully deterministic and free will and agency do not exist, and we should be much kinder to people who e.g. commit crimes (they were forced to do it by their brain state, after all)...

I don't think that's consistent, as the same reasoning applies to the people (i.e. the 'we' in your statement) who will, in some way or perhaps not at all, censure the perpetrator of said crime.

In other words, if full determinism removes agency from the perpetrator, then it also removes it from everyone else.

foolswisdom• 2 years ago

Additionally, the possibility of consequences (including those created and enforced by human beings, formal or otherwise) are also factors in the "deterministic" action of an individual, so for the benefit of society (assuming there are outcomes that society can improve via expectations and consequences) then it makes perfect sense for there to be consequences.

Bottom line though, whether the system is deterministic or not doesn't affect our experience of it.

guerrilla4• 2 years ago

In other words, if full determinism removes agency from the perpetrator, then it also removes it from everyone else.

This is irrelevant to their claim. Normative statements don't require anyone actually have agency. After all, it's possible that everyone should do something that nobody can do.

If you want to say that fine then their claim is irrelevant too, then sure, but it's in no way inconsistent. I think it is relevant though. We can do things differently than we do them, like after reading this comment section; we just can't do them differently than we will do.

Worse still. Your guilty of the same thing you're accusing the poster of.

Barrin922• 2 years ago

free will and agency are two very different terms. Free will is a philosophically charged term that is often incoherent or ill defined, agency is fairly straight forward, it's the capacity of any actor to realize their goals and act autonomously in their own interest. It's the ability to shape your surroundings rather than be shaped by them.

There's plenty of agency in a deterministic universe, a dictator with a nuke has a lot more of it than a slave in a cage. There's no need to be nicer to criminals on grounds that the universe is deterministic, which it is. (both in Newtonian physics and quantum mechanics). The nice guy is as deterministic as the criminal. None of them are "forced to do" anything by their brain state, there is no subject that is puppeteered around by your brain like some reverse dualism, you and I are our brains (and bodies). What matters is if you want criminals to have more agency, and if you don't, you punish them.

criddell2• 2 years ago

What matters is if you want criminals to have more agency, and if you don’t, you punish them.

In a deterministic universe, “want” doesn’t mean much. That you would decide to punish a criminal is the only thing that could happen.

cyclotron3k• 2 years ago

the universe is deterministic, which it is. (both in Newtonian physics and quantum mechanics).

Bold claim. Have there been some advancements in our understanding, that I'm not aware of?

sbuttgereit• 2 years ago

...we __should__ be much kinder to people...

This implies a choice. If there is no free will, all you can say is we will or we won't based on our current brain state. Sure, we don't know what that outcome will be, but it's already determined by our own current brain state.

(they were forced to do it by their brain state, after all)

Any any punishment from cruel and unusual or no punishment at all was forced by the brain states of the people in a position to decide and carry out any punishment. Again, without any free will, any talk about what "we should do" is pointless: it's determined.

Your much kinder argument I also think falls completely flat because I really think you end up in a binary: either you are culpable for your actions or not. If determinism excuses your dastardly acts in part because of lack of agency, what possible argument remains for not simply pretending that no wrong ever happened? On the other side, if a society living in a deterministic world still receives benefit from deterrence and retribution, then there would be no difference than if we're living in a world with free agency: so determinism ceases to be an argument about the degree we punish.

I do actually agree with you at one point: either the world is fundamentally deterministic or it isn't. I do think something approaching free will may possibly be an emergent feature of our world, much like a single hemisphere has no roll, but putting two together and rolling emerges. But even that, at the root would be fundamentally deterministic.

I would also suggest this. Whether or not free will is a fundamental feature of the world we live in or simply an illusion due to our inability to follow our own brains from one state to the next: you better live your live like free will is a thing and not worry too much about how predestined your actions are: if free will is an illusion, that illusion is strong... the outcomes will be determined by states that include the influences of free will like assumptions, or the absence thereof. If free will is a thing: you're covered. Of course giving this advice presumes you have a choice in taking it or not... if there is no free will you either will or won't and the only questions arise out of our inability to project into what we call the future.

monkeycantype• 2 years ago

my brain holds a set of values, I rely on deterministic physics for them to be expressed through my decisions and actions, I do not want a magic quantum 8-ball meddling in the middle

Who I am aligns with what I do because the universe is deterministic.

eightysixfour• 2 years ago

Sam Harris' podcast, "Final Thoughts on Free Will" finally pushed me over the edge into believing that we don't have free will in the way we seem to want to. In particular the argument that if you really examine your own lived, conscious experience that you call free will, you'll find it isn't as free as you thought. Random/stochastic processes don't generate free will, they just add noise to a deterministic system.

Just as importantly, I'm not sure that it really matters.

galaxyLogic3• 2 years ago

I think Free Will must be understood from the point of an actor who is trying to influence other actors. How will the actor we are trying to influence react? WE cannot force their reaction. Therefore from our point of view they have free will. We cannot control their will. Whereas, if they were puppets we could control their behavior to a large degree.

This has to do with the point about agency in the article. Everything in your "light-cone" can and will affect what decisions you make. But there are so many butterflies in your light-cone that you cannot say any one of them (alone) decides what your decision is. They cannot force your decisions and thus you have free will. No other actor can control your decisions. You are free of their will, thus your will is free of their will. Thus you have "free will".

ttonkytonk3• 2 years ago

Our will is not free, it belongs to us!

galaxyLogic3• 2 years ago

We need to first ask what we mean by Free Will before contemplating whether we have it or not. So we have to ask, if we have free will what is it free of? I would propose it means free from undue influence by others.

Think of some politicians claiming they stand for "freedom". Freedom from what and freedom for whom. My freedom to do anything I want, carry a machine gun for instance, interferes from the freedom others want to be free of gun violence. So when talking about freedom we have to always consider freedom for whom to do what? Similarly "free will" must be qualified by: free of what?

I think a good answer is "free from coercion by others". Now, you can coerce me to do anything, to say anything, and really to WANT anything you want me to want, by threatening my life with a gun. So, we only have free will in as far nobody is infringing on our basic freedoms.

Does chaos theory square classical physics with human agency?

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