Three Arguments Against Determinism

[Jonti]

1) What evidence does a determinist have to suggest their ideas are true? If one cannot help what one thinks, one may be thinking nonsense and yet have no way of correcting that. Why should the initial conditions of creation have been such that one's beliefs about the 8:16 from Liverpool Street, or, come to that, determinism, are in fact true?

2) Determinism suffers from the same problems as time travel, or clairvoyance about the future. Suppose the future is entirely predictable from the past. Then, in principle, everything that you do or say in the next hour is predictable. Until some evil genius spills the beans to you about your future fate. Then you can change it ...

3) Consciousness has no role to play under determinism. Consciousness is just a colourful flag streaming along in the breeze behind events, buffeted by them, but having no influence on them in return. But if consciousness cannot affect events, it cannot affect speech, which is a sort of event. Why then do people report that they are conscious?

 

[Knotted]

1) What evidence does a determinist have to suggest their ideas are true? If one cannot help what one thinks, one may be thinking nonsense and yet have no way of correcting that. Why should the initial conditions of creation have been such that one's beliefs about the 8:16 from Liverpool Street, or, come to that, determinism, are in fact true?

This is a fair point, but the same could be said about indeterminism. Its impossible to provide evidence either way. The question is rather which proposition is more reasonable.

My objection to non-deterministic theories is that they describes physical change in non-physical terms. This I think leads either to notions of mind before matter or to notions of a supernature whose nature is inaccessible to us. It seems too extreme a proposition to take on lightly.

2) Determinism suffers from the same problems as time travel, or clairvoyance about the future. Suppose the future is entirely predictable from the past. Then, in principle, everything that you do or say in the next hour is predictable. Until some evil genius spills the beans to you about your future fate. Then you can change it ...

Well nobody ever said determining the future is easy. For all practicle purposes predicting the future precisely is impossible.

This says nothing about a deterministic ontology though.

What I might grant, however, is that there might be a theoretical reason that you cannot fully predict your own actions in that you cannot have a full knowledge about what you know. There is probably a Godel type paradox here. Even then this is not an ontological claim of indeterminism but rather an epistemological claim of absolute indeterminism.

3) Consciousness has no role to play under determinism. Consciousness is just a colourful flag streaming along in the breeze behind events, buffeted by them, but having no influence on them in return. But if consciousness cannot affect events, it cannot affect speech, which is a sort of event. Why then do people report that they are conscious?

Surely this is just as true of indeterministic ontologies. What you are arguing against here is reductionism.

Furthermore the descrepancy between what I call ontological determinism and epistemological determinism might just account for the illusion of consciousness. That's just a thought, but surely it suggests a more hopeful scheme than trying to explain the illusion of conscious through indeterminism - which is all that a nondeterministic reductionist approach can achieve.

 

[118118]

notions of a supernature

Are you a realist wrt natural laws? How do laws produce their effects? Why do laws exist? Why are laws more real than objects, when the objectivist world view is given meaning by a pre-objectivist world view? Doesn't the view from no-where just mean that everything is invisible? Wouldn't it be better to think of the view from everywhere, which can only be reached by a view from somewhere. Isn't the view from no-where an abstraction?

illusion of consciousness

Nah. For something to be an illusion, something has to be fooled. Infinite regress?

 

[Knotted]

That's a lot of questions. I'll have a go at answering them.

Are you a realist wrt natural laws?
Yes.
How do laws produce their effects?
Laws don't produce effects - they express relations.
Why do laws exist?
I don't know.
Why are laws more real than objects, when the objectivist world view is given meaning by a pre-objectivist world view?
Laws are no more real than objects - you can't have one without the other. Doesn't the view from no-where just mean that everything is invisible?
Maybe, but I'm a realist with respect to science so I don't believe physical objects or physical laws only exist when they are observed so the question of the viewer being nowhere, somewhere or everywhere is only a bizzarre epistemological question.
Wouldn't it be better to think of the view from everywhere, which can only be reached by a view from somewhere. Isn't the view from no-where an abstraction?
Yes. See above.

[/QUOTE=118118]
Nah. For something to be an illusion, something has to be fooled. Infinite regress?[/QUOTE]

Possibly. Any question about consciousness is inevitably slippery since there is no generally agreed definition of what consciousness is. Poorly defined notions generally lead to infinite regressions.

 

[118118]

Do you think subjectivity is an illusion? I think for the purposes of this discussion we can agree to a definition - I think it was the word illusion there, however well defined 'consciousness' was, that led to the infinite regress. An object cannot be fooled, can it?

Laws don't produce effects - they express relations

So what is a law? Sorry.

How can an objectivist theory account for relations between objects? How do relations between objects produce their effects?

 

[Knotted]

Do you think subjectivity is an illusion. I think for the purposes of this discussion we can agree to a definition - I think it was the word illusion there, however well defined 'consciousness' was, was what led to the infinite regress.

Ultimately subjectivity is an illusion. Every subject is an object. For everyday purposes we can talk about subjects and their relation to objects if it helps us understand what is going on but really we are just talking about related objects.

And yes the word 'illusion' is poorly defined but that's because it implicitly contains a notion of consciousness. Similarly with subjectivity.

So what is a law? Sorry.

Good question. I'll have a go:
A scientific law is an expression of physical symmetry.

How can an objectivist theory account for relations between objects?

With difficulty. Isn't that an objectivist question, though?

 

[118118]

Ultimately subjectivity is an illusion

Maybe you can dodge my questions, but it would be incompetent to dodge subjectivity etc

Find a better word than illusion, then?

 

[118118]

Good question. I'll have a go:
A scientific law is an expression of physical symmetry.

You mean a regularity, no (Why couldn't you just say that then )? All sorts of problems with that, I think.

Whats the point talking to scientists, they keep alluding to things that aren't real.

Not sure I understand your last point.

 

[Knotted]

Maybe you can dodge my questions, but it would be incompetent to dodge subjectivity etc

Well since I'm accused of being an 'objectivist', which is not something I understand, then I would have thought it would be my sworn duty to deny 'subjectivism'.

Find a better word than illusion, then?

Can't. I'm happy with using poorly defined words in order convey meaning. People generally do this all the time! I may be strange but only using words of exact meaning would make me very strange indeed! I sort of know what I mean, you sort of know what I mean. So you can see roughly where I'm coming from and I'm happy to leave it at that. If you want to convey roughly (or for that matter precisely) where you are coming from in order to contrast with your understanding of what I am saying then feel free.

 

[Knotted]

You mean a regularity, no (Why couldn't you just say that then )? All sorts of problems with that, I think.

I'm making all this up on the spot, so you will have to take the rough with the smooth. Symmetry has a more precise meaning than regularity in my view.

Whats the point talking to scientists, they keep alluding to things that aren't real.

I'm not a scientist, but what's wrong with alluding to things that aren't real?

Not sure I understand your last point.

I'm not going to be the only one answering cryptic questions in this discussion. Why can't I ask some cryptic questions as well?

 

[samk]

1) What evidence does a determinist have to suggest their ideas are true? If one cannot help what one thinks, one may be thinking nonsense and yet have no way of correcting that. Why should the initial conditions of creation have been such that one's beliefs about the 8:16 from Liverpool Street, or, come to that, determinism, are in fact true?

2) Determinism suffers from the same problems as time travel, or clairvoyance about the future. Suppose the future is entirely predictable from the past. Then, in principle, everything that you do or say in the next hour is predictable. Until some evil genius spills the beans to you about your future fate. Then you can change it ...

3) Consciousness has no role to play under determinism. Consciousness is just a colourful flag streaming along in the breeze behind events, buffeted by them, but having no influence on them in return. But if consciousness cannot affect events, it cannot affect speech, which is a sort of event. Why then do people report that they are conscious?

Disclaimer: I am not convinced determinism is true, but I do believe it is reasonable to consider it a likely possibility.

1. Evidence for determinism: Most of physics, aside from apparently random quantum stuff (which even if genuinely random may be of little more higher-level consequence than chaos theory would be anyway, and of no assistance with the problems of free will and consciousness), and may be deterministic at a level below spacetime (see t'hooft), or see also many worlds theory where all of the 'random' possibilities exist, and the apparent uncertainty due to us not knowing which universe we exist in, ie if a copy of us experiences each possible outcome, then the only prediction we can reliably make is we will find ourselves in a universe where a likely outcome has occurred.

Whether our thoughts are reliable: Nondeterminism doesn't help you here anyway; what does is if your ideas are produced by a mechanism that reliably produces correct ideas

Evolution will tend to (more or less, we know that self-deception and reasoning biases exist in humans) produce such a mechanism if it produces a thinking entity at all. Science has shown many of our intuitive ideas are wrong, but science produces new ideas, many of which then extend well to situations beyond the ones they were conceived in, suggesting strongly they are true, at least for all practical purposes.

Ie, the question only matters once a thinking process exists at all, after which individuals/ideas that predict less well will eliminate themselves by their inefficiency, but whatever your philosophy, one can never be certain

2. In general, a part of a larger whole can't predict the whole for just that reason, so no such evil genius can exist. If they can, they must have a computer outside the universe, which because the universe is determined cannot report a result to the universe to cause that paradox.

3. If determinism is true, consciousness must then be just another mechanism/pattern. This doesn't make it an illusion, just not what we thought it was. Trying to create a copy of a human brain in a computer, and seeing if it behaves normally without special hacking unprecedented in other complex simulations hopefully will settle the issue

editing due to frenzied and sloppy drafting

 

[Fruitloop]

As Steven Pinker says, even if the pretty far-fetched theories for a completely non-deterministic consciousness were to be proved correct, and it was all down to some quantum flickering in microtubules or whatever, what difference would that really make to the ethical issues/free will/culpability etc? Are the random meanderings of some quantum lightswitch really that superior to a consciousness that is as no-quite-determinate as the rest of the universe, or are we really just hankering after an immortal soul connected at the pineal gland?

 

[Knotted]

As Steven Pinker says, even if the pretty far-fetched theories for a completely non-deterministic consciousness were to be proved correct, ...

Who has proposed these theories? Just curious. Cheers.

 

[samk]

Roger Penrose

 

[Knotted]

Roger Penrose

Determinism is irrellevant to Penrose's ideas. I wouldn't be surprised if someone has developed a theory of consciousness based on quantum indeterminism, I've just never come across one.

 

[118118]

I thought that it was perfectly possible to believe in determinism, and not objectivist (naturalist, I think) materialism. But not free-will - most likely at least.

if consciousness cannot affect events

Aren't you redefining consciousness to mean free will?

 

[meurig]

Cool thread. TPH appears to be back on form.

 

[Jonti]

One can always be a compatibilist, of course. Most people are, I suspect. Kipling, anyone?

LORD, Thou hast made this world below the shadow of a dream,
An', taught by time, I tak' it so -- exceptin' always Steam.
From coupler-flange to spindle-guide I see Thy Hand, O God --
Predestination in the stride o' yon connectin'-rod.

Danniel Dennett is good on this topic. Check this video from meaningoflife.tv

 

[Jonti]

Aren't you redefining consciousness to mean free will?

One cannot have freewill without also consciousness. And consciousness without freewill seems perverse, just an immobile witness to events.

So yes, consciousness and freewill share common ground. Physically, I'd guess they both stem from information being created in the organism. A useful trick if you want to do yourself favours and avoid harm.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

Furthermore the descrepancy between what I call ontological determinism and epistemological determinism might just account for the illusion of consciousness. That's just a thought, but surely it suggests a more hopeful scheme than trying to explain the illusion of conscious through indeterminism - which is all that a nondeterministic reductionist approach can achieve.

How is it that a guy who bandies about terminology like ontological indeterminism doesn't know how to spell 'discrepancy'?

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

Are you a realist wrt natural laws? How do laws produce their effects? Why do laws exist? Why are laws more real than objects, when the objectivist world view is given meaning by a pre-objectivist world view? Doesn't the view from no-where just mean that everything is invisible? Wouldn't it be better to think of the view from everywhere, which can only be reached by a view from somewhere. Isn't the view from no-where an abstraction?
Nah. For something to be an illusion, something has to be fooled. Infinite regress?

Laws don't produce effects; laws are human attempts at understanding processes.

Laws exist because people make them up.

They aren't more real than objects, but are arguably equally real.

Re: illusion: something is fooled - the thinker.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

Ultimately subjectivity is an illusion. Every subject is an object.

Yes, but the dichotomy arises from an attempt to understand perspective.

 

[Knotted]

Yes, but the dichotomy arises from an attempt to understand perspective.

Which makes it a useful fiction. Nothing wrong with using a useful fiction.

 

[Knotted]

How is it that a guy who bandies about terminology like ontological indeterminism doesn't know how to spell 'discrepancy'?

That's nothing I've mispelt 'road' before.

 

[Knotted]

One can always be a compatibilist, of course.

I'm not sure the question of free will is a particularly useful one. In my view compatibilism is obviously true, but what question does it answer?

If we interpret 'free' to mean 'independent', which I think is reasonable, what are we claiming to be independent of? Are we independent of the motion of Saturn? Are we independent of the functioning of our central nervous system? Are we independent of our own consciousness? (and yes I'm leaving terms like 'we' and 'consciousness' undefined)

Usually a belief about the 8:17 from Liverpool Street Station is based on the actual 8:17 from Liverpool Street Station. So our freedom to believe it is on time is dependent (ie. not entirely free from) the actual train (or at least the timetable).

The question is where you draw the line if at all.

 

[Fruitloop]

Yeah, that sounds pretty much spot on. Who is this 'me' who could potentially not be in control of 'my' actions?

 

[118118]

Re: illusion: something is fooled - the thinker

Yeah, the thinking subject. Don't you find it a bit embaressing that you have to go around pretending that you and I dont exist, to make your grand theories work. I mean, everything that is said presupposes that you do - there are so many allusions to unreal things. Doesn't a thinker presuppose a mind, at least a mind that is indential with a bain. So even in this respect I do exist - I am a mind that is identical with a brain. Whatever illusion my brain is under that I exist, it is alot more convincing than the illusion that God does. If my rationality is consistently being fooled, does this mean that we are all mentally ill?

 

[118118]

And consciousness without freewill seems perverse, just an immobile witness to events

Why would it have to be immobile

 

[118118]

Usually a belief about the 8:17 from Liverpool Street Station is based on the actual 8:17 from Liverpool Street Station. So our freedom to believe it is on time is dependent (ie. not entirely free from) the actual train (or at least the timetable).

The question is where you draw the line if at all.

Well, imo the fact that there are situations rules out absolute freedom - Sartre then being wrong to say that freedom creates the obstacles that we use our freedom to overcome (say, the obstacle that I have to go to work on Monday). Infact, freedom takes up the history that freedom is offering, our freedom has a root in our social nature, which offer us solutions to a past that it overcomes e.g. having to work 5 days a week.

Perhaps there is a misunderstanding in that you all seem to beleive that freedom is about having a soul that is indpendent of physical events. Isn't it more to do with an event not entailing a succesive event

 

[muser]

Ultimately subjectivity is an illusion. Every subject is an object. For everyday purposes we can talk about subjects and their relation to objects if it helps us understand what is going on but really we are just talking about related objects.

And yes the word 'illusion' is poorly defined but that's because it implicitly contains a notion of consciousness. Similarly with subjectivity.



Good question. I'll have a go:
A scientific law is an expression of physical symmetry.



With difficulty. Isn't that an objectivist question, though?

I once had a discussion with Violentpanda about the merits of objectivity over subjectivity. Unfortunately I wasn't as knowledgable as you, and kept blindly stating a fact that I thought was true but couldn't give appropriate reasoning for. Violentpanda to his credit did say that nothing could be wholy subjective. I did a quick wikipedia for Godel, but could you please tell me about the godel parodoxs, and is its use restricted to axioms or does it go further.