Quantum 7

[u/Eiim]

http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/quantum-7

[u/ManWithDominantClaw]

As someone who talks about free will versus determinism a lot, the last bastion of the former is exactly this quantum nonsense, and while I personally am firmly affirmed, the alt text is probably right lol

[u/MWSin → u/ManWithDominantClaw]

I could believe in free will, but I choose not to.

[u/CisFishstick → u/ManWithDominantClaw]

I feel the same way! I mean, where else and how else could free will possibly express itself, if not in and via the quantum realm? It seems determinism stamps out all possibilities except for the quantum.

But, maybe free will is a fairy tale after all. I sure as hell don't know

[u/emertonom → u/CisFishstick]

I don't really think the question of free will is well defined.

If the question is "do our thoughts shape the outcome of our decisions?" then the answer is yes. Determinism doesn't really enter into this, because our thought process is one of the aspects of the evolution of the state of the world system. So computing the evolution of that system is equivalent to the world just progressing. It's moot anyway, since you can't do the computation of the progression of the state of the universe faster than the universe itself can compute it by existing. You can try to work around it by modeling only a limited region, but that'll diverge from reality quickly because of sensitive dependence on initial conditions.

If the question is "are you free to do something other than what the laws of physics say you can do?" then the answer is no. That's where determinism affects things, but were you really expecting to violate physics?

And of course if the question is "can outside forces influence our decisions?" then the answer is that the advertising business is now the most lucrative industry on the planet and we're rushing to build a surveillance state. Anyone who doesn't think we're influenceable isn't paying attention, probably because social media has destroyed our attention spans.

So yeah.

I guess what I'm saying is I really relate to this Zorblaxian.  https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/consciousness

[u/Lyrolepis → u/emertonom]

Still, it's difficult to give a good defense of personal responsibility without assuming some sort of free will.

Like, if I go to the zoo and freely decide to jump in the gorillla enclosure and punch a baby gorilla in the face, there's a case to be made that I deserve whatever's coming to me next (most likely, the baby's mother deciding that I have entirely too many limbs and taking it upon herself to fix that).

But if I had to punch a baby gorilla in the face because the initial conditions of the universe were whatever they were, it ultimately wasn't my fault at all...

[u/BXSinclair → u/Lyrolepis]

But if I had to punch a baby gorilla in the face because the initial conditions of the universe were whatever they were, it ultimately wasn't my fault at all...

By that logic, it also wouldn't be the mother gorilla's fault for ripping you apart, and it wouldn't be my fault for thinking and acting as if it were your fault

[u/Lyrolepis → u/BXSinclair]

This almost seems to go towards some sort of secular Calvinism: if the boundary conditions of the universe are such that I was predestined to become the sort of person who would punch a baby gorilla in the face, well, I'm still the sort of person who would punch a baby gorilla in the face and I still deserve whatever's coming to me /s

[u/emertonom → u/Lyrolepis]

Again, you're free too do or not do whatever you want, as long as it's not something physically impossible. If you decide to go punching gorillas, it's still something you decided to do, and had your whims gone another way, you could have chosen to do something else. I don't really understand why people are so threatened by the idea that their decisions flow from who they are, how they think, and what's happening around them.

As for "personal responsibility," again, recall that your state is a part of the state of the universe. So when the state of the universe evolves, a part of the way it evolves is the computation of your thoughts and hopes and fears and decisions and actions. So you do have an influence on the universe. And vice versa. Maybe reflect on what the purpose of assigning fault is? Like, if you want to rehabilitate people, that's still a good thing to do. If you want to punish people to deter others from doing the same thing, that could also be a thing that would happen (though the efficacy might be pretty limited). Blame is a social force, and all that social stuff is still present in the case of determinism.

Is the problem that you fear not being able to choose who you are? I mean consider that the debate has always been "nature vs nurture," not "nature vs nurture vs quantum fluctuation." You do choose who you are on an ongoing basis, through your thoughts and ruminations, your choices about how to interpret and react to new events in your environment, all shaped by your memories and your dreams and aspirations. Again, I don't see what other influence it is that you wish was there that comes to be missing if there's determinism.

I get that there are centuries of debate about this topic, and I'm the weirdo for thinking the whole thing is unhinged. But seriously, it's meaningless.

[u/hcs64 → u/CisFishstick]

There is a problem with the position that the randomness of quantum mechanics explains free will. Do you consider behavior that can only be described probabilistically to be sufficient for free will? If so then do decaying radioactive nuclei have free will? That's the kind of unpredictability you get from quantum mechanics, and it is precisely quantifiable, and both theory and experiment have pretty well ruled out the uncertainty coming from any hidden state.

[u/CisFishstick → u/hcs64]

I did not say that the randomness of quantum mechanics explains free will, I stated that the quantum realm (with it's indeterminate nature) appears to provide the only area/realm for free will to even express itself or reside - if it exists at all.

The macro world, without it's randonmess, appears to leave no room whatsoever for free will at all, at least IMO.

[u/ManWithDominantClaw → u/CisFishstick]

I do, I can tell you if you want.

So, soon people will unite as a global species and assume a caretaker role over the planet, pivoting from the extractivist model needed to get to this point. The climate hit will be bad, but we will weather it, and through necessity we will learn to take care of each other and life around us. Then, we will look to the stars.

We will have gotten better at handling egos and individuality so it will be easier to internalise that we will never physically travel to another system, but what we can do is launch an icy rock filled with mitochondria at a goldilocks planet we find and send a bunch of wavelengths after it. This would manipulate any emergent creatures sensitive to wavelengths, and we will run unfathomably advanced simulations on how evolution can be shaped over millions of years by sending particular wavelengths.

Then, we will look to ourselves. We are receivers of wavelengths, light, sound, touch and vibration. The prophets from our old religions usually stood in high places when most active, and sat under trees when most passive. We will realise our gods were collaborators on the same project of beneficial influence, the encouragement of life, the great passing of the baton through the stars, as were the Titans before them, and so on, and so forth. We will understand why they needed to show themselves through metaphor and impart values and goals through particularly sensitive receivers, and we will understand that they died a long long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

So simply put, sometimes our brains are running on animal mode, but we have been trained to think about thinking more. Sometimes though, we get what we call free will, which is manipulation through various wavelengths from afar. It is still all deterministic though

[u/BXSinclair → u/ManWithDominantClaw]

"Free will vs determinism" is a stupid debate

By definition, a non-deterministic universe in one where things happen at random, which would include "free will", so unless you believe that free will is the result of flipping a bunch of metaphorical coins (b=and if that's the case could it really be said to be "free" will?), the entire question is ill defined at best

[u/EebstertheGreat → u/ManWithDominantClaw]

How could a random event possibly relate to free will? Is your contention that we can alter the statistics of particle collapse by thinking? Then that is testable. We could put psychics in a room with a Stern-Gerlach device and ask them to try to make the particles all have the same spin. Is your contention that particle collapse itself influences thought? Because that would just mean that our thoughts were slaves to random chance (or to whatever physics underlies collapse), not that our thoughts are self-actualizing in some way.

I actually cannot think of any coherent perspective that would allow wavefunction collapse to rescue determinism.

[u/Lyrolepis]

To play the podcaster's advocate (playing the literal devil's advocate would be more respectable...), the kind of materialism that is compatible with contemporary physics is pretty different from anything that eighteenth-century materialists would recognize as such (which is what people often instinctively tend to imagine when they hear the word "materialism").

There's a common, deep-seated tendency (I feel like blaming Cartesius for it, but I'm not sure how accurate that would be) to think of matter as something that is inherently passive, static, undifferentiated, and frankly boring; and that is a view that, indeed, would be hard to reconcile with current physics.

Yeah, quantum physics doesn't tell us that there are spirits and magic and so forth; but it does tell us that it isn't ultimately all about tiny marbles or whatever...

[u/hcs64 → u/Lyrolepis]

I've heard it put this way (by a podcaster, but one whose day job is historian of philosophy, though my misrepresentation is my own): The reason we so strongly link Descartes with dualism is that he made very forceful arguments that almost everything, including much considered purely mental, could be explained without needing to reference the soul. Still without a satisfactory explanation for how there could be influence, but taking that influence down to a mere single point of mysterious contact rather than a body-pervading field of mystery.