Yesterday I discussed a recent article from PhysicsToday by Philip Ball, which you can access by clicking on the screenshot below. I argued, and will continue to argue, that Ball’s attacks on free will are misguided for several reasons. He fails to define free will; does not seem able to distinguish between predictability and determinism; does not appreciate that naturalism (determinism + quantum uncertainty) absolutely destroys the libertarian notion of free will held by most people (and nearly all Abrahamic religionists); and has confused notions of “causation”. Today I’ll briefly discuss the last point, as well as Ball’s misguided claim that accepting naturalism has no implications for our behavior or ways of thinking.
First, let’s review. Ball accepts the laws of physics as being the underlying basis of all phenomena, and so he is a naturalist (or a “physical determinist” if you will; I’ll simply use “determinism” to mean “naturalism”). But he then argues that this kind of reduction of everything to physics renders behavioral science a straw man. I find that claim bizarre, for even we “hard determinists” recognize that we can’t say much meaningful about social behavior from the laws of physics alone. But our recognition of that doesn’t mean, as Ball asserts it does, that disciplines like history, game theory, and sociology become “pseudosciences”.
First, none of us think that: we recognize that meaningful analysis, understanding, and even predictions can be made by analyzing macro phenomena on their own levels. So this paragraph is arrant nonsense, attacking a position that almost nobody holds:
If the claim that we never truly make choices is correct, then psychology, sociology and all studies of human behaviour are verging on pseudoscience. Efforts to understand our conduct would be null and void because the real reasons lie in the Big Bang. Neuropsychology would be nothing more than the enumeration of correlations: this action tends to happen at the same time as this pattern of brain activity, but there is no causal relation. Game theory is meaningless as no player is choosing their action because of particular rules, preferences or circumstances of the game. These “sciences” would be no better than studies of the paranormal: wild-goose chases after illusory phenomena. History becomes merely a matter of inventing irrelevant stories about why certain events happened.
Ball is correct in saying that meaningful analyses in these areas can be conducted without devolving to the level of particles. But that’s nothing new! Further, he seems to misunderstand the meaning of “pseudoscience”. The Oxford English Dictionary defines pseudoscience this way:
“A spurious or pretended science; a branch of knowledge or a system of beliefs mistakenly regarded as based on scientific method or having the status of scientific truth.”
But in fact, all those areas above, from sociology to neuropsychology, often use the scientific method: the empirical toolkit also used by biology, chemistry, and so on. If they find “truth” by observation, testability, attempts at falsification, and consensus, then they are “science in the broad sense” and not pseudoscience. They are using methods continuous with the methods used by “hard” scientists to find truth.
Second, by his very admission of physical determinism, Ball already settles the issue of free will: we don’t have it, at least in the libertarian sense. His statement below gives away the game:
Classical chaos makes prediction of the future practically impossible, but it is still deterministic. And while quantum events are not deterministic – as far as we can currently tell – their apparently fundamental randomness can’t deliver willed action.
In other words, physics, which Ball admits has to comport with everything at a “higher level”, can’t deliver willed action. Thus, if you construe free will in the libertarian, you-could-have-done-otherwise sense, then Ball’s arguments show that we don’t have it.
And that’s pretty much all I care about. I don’t care whether, given you’ve accepted determinism, you go on to play the semantic game of compatibilism (Ball doesn’t). For it’s determinism itself that, when accepted, has profound consequences for how we view life and society. Many disagree, but so be it. One of those who disagrees, though, is Ball (see below).
Ball makes three more points that I’ll discuss here. The first involves “causation”. Because we can’t understand social behavior, or, in this case, the evolution of chimpanzees, from principles of physics, one can’t say that physics “caused” the evolution of chimpanzees. We need another level of analysis:
What “caused” the existence of chimpanzees? If we truly believe causes are reducible, we must ultimately say: conditions in the Big Bang. But it’s not just that a “cause” worthy of the name would be hard to discern there; it is fundamentally absent.
To account for chimps, we need to consider the historical specifics of how the environment plus random genetic mutations steered the course of evolution. In a chimp, matter has been shaped by evolutionary principles – we might justifiably call them “forces” – that are causally autonomous, even though they arise from more fine-grained phenomena. To complain that such “forces” cannot magically direct the blind interactions between particles is to fundamentally misconstrue what causation means. The evolutionary explanation for chimps is not a higher-level explanation of an underlying “chimpogenic” physics – it is the proper explanation.
Again I assert that, at bottom, the evolution of chimps was “dictated” by the laws of physics: the deterministic forces as well as the random ones, which could include mutations. (I’ve argued that the evolution of life could not have been predicted, even with perfect knowledge, after the Big Bang, given that some evolutionary phenomena, like mutations, may have a quantum component.)
But if Ball thinks biologists can figure out what “caused” the evolution of chimps, he’s on shaky ground. He has no idea, nor do we, what evolutionary forces gave rise to them, nor the specific mutations that had to arise for evolution to work. We don’t even know what “caused” the evolution of bipedal hominins, though we can make some guesses. We’re stuck here with plausibility arguments, though some assertions about evolution can be tested (i.e., chimps and hominins had a common ancestor; amphibians evolved from fish, and so on). And yes, that kind of testing doesn’t involve evoking the laws of physics, but so what? My work on speciation, Haldane’s rule, and so on, is perfectly compatible with my hard determinism. I would never admit that my career in evolutionary genetics, in view of my determinism, was an exercise in “pseudoscience.”
At any rate, Ball and I do agree that evolutionary scenarios like this require a level of analysis removed from that of particle physics, and also a language (“mutations”, “selection”, “environmental change”, and so on) that differs from the language used by physicists. Again, so what? We already knew that.
Second, Ball floats the idea of “top down” causation, something I don’t fully understand but, as far as I do understand it, it doesn’t show that macro phenomena result from the laws of physics, both deterministic and indeterministic, acting at lower levels. To me the concept is almost numinous:
There is good reason to believe that causation can flow from the top down in complex systems – work by Erik Hoel of Tufts University in Massachusetts and others has shown as much. The condensed-matter physicist and Nobel laureate Philip Anderson anticipated such notions in his 1972 essay “More is different” (Science 177 393). “The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe,” he wrote.
I’ll let readers argue this out, but if physicists like Sean Carroll and Brian Greene are not on board with this—and as far as I know, they aren’t—then I have reason to be skeptical.
Finally, Ball appears to think that understanding and dispelling the idea of free will has absolutely no implications for anything:
Those who say that free will, and attendant moral responsibility, don’t exist but we should go on acting as if they do rather prove that their position is empty because it neither illuminates nor changes anything about how we do and should behave.
This is not at all an empty position, not just because it shows that our feeling of agency isn’t what it seems to be (in that sense it’s an “illusion”), but also because the absence of libertarian free will changes a lot about how we view the world. As I’ve argued, it changes our view of how we see punishment and reward, how we regard those people who are seen as “failures in life,” and how we see our own tendency to regret our past behaviors, and wish we’d done otherwise. If you see that people aren’t really in control of their lives, at least in the sense of exercising a “will” that can affect how you decide at a given moment, then it makes you less retributive, more forgiving, and less hard on yourself.
Now I know some readers will say that to them it doesn’t matter. Whether or not we have libertarian free will, or compatibilist free will, they argue, doesn’t matter: the drive to reform prisons will be the same. I don’t agree. And the claim that how one sees libertarian free will affects one’s view of life is supported by statistics showing that if people thought they really lived in a world ruled by the laws of physics, with no libertarian free will, they would believe that moral responsibility goes out the window. (I sort of agree: I still think people are “responsible” for their actions, but the idea of “moral” responsibility is connected with “you-could-have-chosen-to-do-otherwise.”) At any rate, people know instinctively that the common notion of free will has important consequences for themselves and society.
And thus, brothers and sisters, friends and comrades, I endeth my sermon on the lucubrations of Brother Ball.
It’s funny, I just commented – only because it is worth saying – on Part 1 about how chaotic systems are deterministic – and then I see Mr. Ball accounted for it.
I wonder, if there are other things physics does not apply to?
I take it you are /s [sarcastic].
But deterministic chaos is an excellent example of how stochasticity obey physical law – it is a classic “clockwork universe” outcome, only too divergent to be predictive – which is the nut of the physics in this. Ball wants to say that he can have his clockwork universe since the hot big bang – never mind that he knows about quantum physics and its inherent stochasticity when localization happens (“wavefunction collapse”) – but he doesn’t want to have it breaking his fragile crystal ball.
Even in an idealized clockwork it wouldn’t work. He can have his particle information, but there isn’t any complexity at the start – entropy is low, future thermodynamic achieved information is lacking. That is information that goes into the genome during evolution, not Ball’s clockwork information.
Ironically, since Ball wants his philosophical generic “cause-effect” model. I wonder if the observable universe – which is the information we have – is obeying complete light cone causality as the entire universe is (since it obeys relativity). I.e. during inflation quantum fluctuations are expanded outside the light cone horizon, only to come back later and become part of the cosmic web of filaments after the hot big bang. This is part of the information erasure process that guarantee low entropy at the start, and even if any erasure didn’t happen in practice – inflation was presumably particle free long since – it points to problem for the philosophic model.
QM has zero inherent stochasticity.
The unitary evolution of the wave function has no inherent stochasticity. The Born rule is irreducibly stochastic. Worse, different observers can apply the Born rule at different times giving irreconcilable different results as long as they are thermodynamically separated. That makes quantum mechanics irreducibly subjective. That’s the measurement paradox.
That is true but it assumes that there are separate wave functions for the system and “the rest.” In fact, they are coupled, or, more accurately, considering them to be uncoupled is an approximation, just like how a butterfly flying over Mt Kilimanjaro at 3:01 last Saturday in part caused my car’s battery to go flat yesterday afternoon.
The butterfly and the battery are constantly undergoing state reduction due to the Born rule being applied many billions of times per second. To a very good approximation they have no wave function. To the extent that they do have a small wave function they inject stochasticity into the world with each Born rule application. Anyway this is just decoherence in action.
Per rules I guess this will be my last post in this thread.
Ok, mine too. However, the Born rule, while a good approximation, assumes that one can decouple subsystems. If there is, in contrast, an overall wave function for the universe as a whole then collapse of the wave function for a particular subsystem is, to me, an illusion.
Thank you (and others) for an interesting discussion.
But we do need concepts of morality (approving of some ways in which people treat each other and disapproving of others), and we do need to make value judgements, regarding some actions as “moral” and others as “immoral”.
For example, here you argue: “Where to start here? First of all, neither Dawkins nor Crick would deny that there is a morality that can be derived from humanism; […] And, of course, humanistic morality is far superior to religious morality.”
If we agree that humanistic morality is superior to religious ways of thinking we then need a naturalistic account of “moral responsibility” that is independent of the religious concept of libertarian free-will — and that is what compatibilism gives.
Yes, if you’ve read what I written, I don’t want to ditch the idea of morality at all. It is a set of agreed-upon rules that helps keep society together. What I want to ditch is the idea of MORAL RESPONSIBILITY, by which I mean that your moral “choices” could have been otherwise. But insofar as your choices don’t comport with morality, it is justifiable to punish you. It’s the phrase I don’t like, not the ideas of either responsibility or morality.
I would agree we have a sense of morality, also we have the concept of morality.
Do we need it?
“we then need a naturalistic account of “moral responsibility”
There never will be something like a “naturalistic account” of moral responsibility. That is out of the question.
Since we – like everything else in the world – are completely and utterly subject to physical laws that know no values, neither good nor evil, it is impossible to generate a naturalistic account of moral responsibility from physical or generally science-based foundations.
Incidentally, Sam Harris is also subject to this misconception that moral rules can be derived from science.
By “naturalistic account of moral responsibility” I mean a naturalistic account of why we have our human nature, with feelings and values, which then explains why we like some ways in which humans act toward each other and dislike others, about which we use the labels “moral” and “immoral”.
That’s different from suggesting that “moral rules can be derived from science”, which I agree cannot be done. (My paragraph above is all descriptive, “deriving moral rules” is prescriptive.)
I can agree with Jerry that “responsibility” seems superfluous if it is a nature we have in any case. (And if it suggests magic “free will” as opposed to evolved propensity to consider unconscious “decisions” as conscious such.) It is in our nature to take responsibility, even in cases where moral is unclear (or even contrary).
But then we get to other unnecessary terms like “punishment” instead of “legal action [of prison]”. Punishment suggests far longer prison terms than and recidivism statistics – i.e. on the scales of decades instead of the two year* minimum – recidivism being higher before and after. And economics should come into it too, which is cheapest for society (but balancing the economic and social costs for victims of crime vs socially distributed costs)?
* Local statistics – and so is the observation of a minimum. But hopefully that is reproducible – prison not only baring recidivism directly but also after.
Thank you for your reply and for correcting my misinterpretation of your post.
In regard to the why of our nature, our time-dependent morality, I would focus on the question of the underlying hidden needs and drives of humans to punish different misconduct / crimes in different ways. Much has been incorporated into legal texts out of a need for retribution and power.
Argh! Physics today publishing dumb crap.
Quantum mechanics does not have any intrinsic randomness. That is a fallacy wrought by oft repeated claims. The system evolves exactly and deterministically according to the Schroedinger equation. It is only the act of observation that results in an unpredictable result. However, that assumes a decoupling of the observer from the system under observation. Normally, that is an excellent approximation but it is only that if one is being exact: an approximation. If the system is the universe then no collapse of the exact wave function is possible without an external observer. I think this is an inescapable conclusion **if** one accepts QM. Ergo, there is no free will — only an excellent approximation to it.
I do not believe that QM is a correct description of the universe but, if one does, it would seem to exclude free will.
The real question is “where does randomness come from, if it exists at all?”
True, but that itself is an incomplete account. As you say, there’s also “observation” and the Born rule.
But nobody believes that it is to do with an “observer” (do they? No-one actually believes that the macroscopic cat is in a quantum superposition, do they?). Most physicists would say that it is something about the interaction of particles that collapses the wavefunction. And leaving aside the MWI (which doesn’t solve anything), that seems to be indeterministic.
Thank you for the reply. However, it does not address my central point that there is no such thing as an external observer if one considers the universe as a whole to be a closed quantum system.
I am not arguing that it is (or is not) but, according to QM, the observer is decoupled from the system. That is an approximation. An excellent one in most cases.
As for the cat, its state is perfectly well defined. It is the observation which is not, but, strictly, the result of the observation is also determined if the wave function is considered to be an entanglement of the “observer” and the cat.
Well yes, my response did address your point: no-one actually believes that “observers” play any role in quantum mechanics.
Therefore it’s irrelevant that there is no such thing as an external observer to the universe.
Ok. Integrate the time dependent Schroedinger equation for every particle in the universe starting fron now. Then tell me where uncertainty comes from.
It is obviously impossible to do, but do it as a thought experiment.
The uncertainty comes from the collapse of the wavefunction (which is something that is additional to the Schroedinger equation, and which we do not understand, but likely does not involve “observers”).
Sure. But in the Everettian interpretation, the uncertainty comes from the human observer not knowing which of the outcome-states they are “in” (interacting with), given that all allowed outcomes happen, with measures given by the Born rule.
In Everettian QM the observer *does* know what branch they’re in, because they can see it, and as a result there is no uncertainty.
I am using “observer” as a metaphor for something that collapses the wave function. The state of the system is defined by the wave function independent of whether it collapses or not. For example, imagine that we have a single H atom that is not interacting with anything else. The state of the atom is not defined by the “position” and ‘momentum” of the electron — these ideas are convenient fictions from classical mechanics — rather it is defined by the wave function. If you know the wave function at time t = 0 then you know it for all time, assuming no interactions. Extend that to the wave function of the entire universe. Then, the state of the universe is defined for all future times.
I agree with you that we don’t understand how quantum mechanics devolves into classical mechanics. But that, essentially, is my point. The notion that QM somehow is random is not correct if we integrate the state of the entire universe forward in time. What is there to collapse that wave function?
Collapse of the wave function when we think of, say, an atom, is caused by interactions with things external to the system. For example, a collision with another atom (it doesn’t have to be a human observer). But if the system is the entire universe — and there seems to be no obvious reason in QM why it cannot be — then what collapses it.
I am not arguing in favor or against free will; I am merely arguing that acceptance of QM rules it out and that free will is an illusion but an excellent approximation.
“Collapse of the wave function when we think of, say, an atom, is caused by interactions with things external to the system.”
But we don’t know that. Collapse could be caused from within the system.
For example, if we consider the “system” of the box containing Schroedinger’s cat, most physicists would say that something within the box has caused the cat’s wavefunction to collapse.
(I’ve never met anyone who actually believes that a macroscopic object as big as a cat is in a superposition of alive and dead; entangled systems seem to be too fragile for that.)
Paul,
That is true and I agree. However, the state of the system evolves perfectly deterministically until it is disturbed. Since a system cannot measure itself then the act of observation (for example) only appears to be an observation because the observer is so weakly coupled coupled to the system. But the observer is coupled nevertheless. If we define the system to be the entire universe then QM implies complete determinism. I don’t buy that this is actually case.
Coel,
I agree with your last point and that, really, is what I have been saying too. What I am saying is that when people use “QM uncertainty” to explain free will it doesn’t work. You are saying that there is something we don’t understand going on, which, really is my point, in that if we don’t understand what’s going on then QM is failing. If we take QM literally then everything is deterministic.
added: and the wave function cannot collapse spontaneously. I integrate the TDSE daily and it never collapses.
Coel, until an observer looks at and understands the measurement, they have temporary uncertainty.
There is a set of QM interpretations called “spontaneous collapse theories”, like the Ghirardi-Rimini-Weber theory, where the wave function collapses without any actual “observation”. The GRW theory makes different predictions than standard QM and as such it could in principle be tested for prediction accuracy.
QM is manifestly partly stochastic and partly deterministic. The Born rule interpreted by observers as stochastic “wavefunction collapse” and the Schrödinger equations (say) of deterministic state propagation.
You didn’t respond to my comment yesterday where I pointed out that the “wavefunction of the universe” Hartle–Hawking state is – so far untestable – among philosophical elaborations adding or modifying axioms to the working “shut-up-and-calculate” Copenhagen machine in order to get “interpretations”.
We know that the wavefunction encapsulates all the knowledge of the system – no hidden variables – and we know the Copenhagen machine produces both non-relativistic quantum mechanics and modern relativistic quantum field theory. It is as if quantum physics itself says “this is all there is”.
But I agree that it doesn’t seem very useful to handle the question of magic “free will” in any case. At best it would be philosophy waring other philosophy, but the physics is that there is no magic (we are biochemical machines).
Since you claim the wavefunction doesn’t collapse, let me add that it appears so when the system localizes particles during interactions, and that it has just been shown that it can be predicted not as an “observer” effect but as a relativistic reference frame effect when you consider what ideal observers would see as per usual [ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-72817-7.pdf ]. Without adding physics to the Copenhagen machine but enforcing “conservation per no preferred reference frame”, “wavefunction collapse” appears as a relativistic effect in the same way that “length contraction” and “time dilation” does. An added upshot is that the Planck constant h must be universally conserved in the same way that the universal speed limit c is.
Whether or not you find the latter point palatable is personal – if it had been an immediate revolution it would have made more of a splash by now – but I do so. It makes relativistic quantum field physics “more of the same” without changing its well tested and sufficient minimalistic functional core.
Sincere apologies for not replying. I missed it. My position is that QM is what it is and resorting to “interpretations” is basically what I am saying. One cannot invoke QM and then say that one needs speculations to add on. I am defining QM to be what it is and not unproven — but interesting — philosophical add-ons.
QM is the TDSE and that is, ineluctably, deterministic as regards the time evolution of the system.
I suspect that we more or less agree. In any case, thank you for the response.
Oh, no problem! And I don’t always see responses to my comments either.
I think you are now saying that “wavefunction collapse” – which is a manifest part of the Copenhagen “machine” – is an “interpretation!? I refer to the shut-up-and-calculate minimalistic functional core. You can’t take it out, and it is part of how you implement Schrödinger equations or Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics to explain observations – as you have to do.
I look back on your comments and it seems to me that you are trying to suppress that manifest physics by making observers part of the system – as they can be – and hence the composite state is propagated. It looks like a variant of Wigner’s friend to me, supposedly as misguided as thinking of particles as localized when they travel, which only transfer the collapse to the next observer in your Russian doll set of states.
A relativistic observer is just a description how the physical laws appears to act out in a certain reference frame if you care for the description. A Wigner’s friend is admittedly a philosophic notion at this point.
—
—
—
[ https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3975 ; FWIW I note that CS Aaronsson seem to support the Hawking-Hartle state.]
A Wigner’s friend doesn’t pull the manifest stochasticity tooth from your aching mouthful of quantum physics.
My point is that QM is a well defined theory that is, mathematically, defined by the TDSE. Spin cannot be included apart from the H atom — i.e., the Dirac equation. To say that QM introduces randomness is not correct in that we do not know how QM applies, even to as simple a system as the He atom.
Therefore, to ascribe “free will” to quantum “randomness” is incorrect. Free will may exist but our current understanding of QM argues against it.
If you can write down an equation then that is determinism. Sure, some chaos theory types argue against that but that involves throwing out the fundamental ideas of mathematics. That may be the case. Who knows?
But philosophical speculations, while fine, are not QM.
Second article I’ve read from Ball and he has a habit of making muddled arguments that seem to betray a lack of thought on the topic. Previously it was an article criticizing the many-worlds interpretation for not providing a good notion of personal identity. Now it’s the claim that human thoughts and behaviors aren’t within the regime of validity of quantum mechanics.
“For it’s determinism itself that, when accepted, has profound consequences for how we view life and society.”
Agreed. Research suggests that many folks, being libertarians about free will, suppose wrong-doers could have become and done otherwise given their environmental and genetic circumstances. Seeing that they couldn’t have subtracts a very deep, ultimate sort of causal origination and blameworthiness, and this in turn can moderate retributive attitudes and associated policies. We should all be good determinists.
Btw, since (as you point out) universal determinism is likely not the case due to quantum uncertainty, what we good determinists have is a *pragmatic* determinism, something good enough for all practical purposes of explanation, prediction, and control at the macro level. You call such pragmatic determinism “naturalism,” which term I think is more applicable to a global, worldview orientation that takes scientific empiricism as the most reliable means of modeling reality. Naturalism on this reading contrasts most directly with supernaturalism in both its religious and new age guises. So most folks here are likely naturalists in this sense even if not pragmatic determinists. There are some naturalists who are libertarians about free will, believe it or not!
“But he then argues that this kind of reduction of everything to physics renders behavioral science a straw man.”
I respectfully submit that you’ve misread Ball on this. He’s saying that this kind of reduction produces an absurdity. He’s claiming the reduction of everything to physics is the part that’s wrong as it eliminates the concept of making choices and trashes the sciences that depend on it. He then goes on to explain that we can have both fundamental physics and the study of human behavior:
“Surely, then, we have to choose one or the other? No, we can have both. It’s simply a matter of recognizing distinct domains of knowledge …”
When you say that no one holds that position, I agree, but it is only because the full extent of the reduction to physics is not being appreciated. If choice is meaningless, so much goes away. You can say, “No it doesn’t”, but it seems to me (and Ball) that it needs much more explanation.
I would say the drive to reform the justice system is better with compatibilism, at least when it comes to moral responsibility. Because the Restorative Justice concept is based in part on moral responsibility:
Now that, to my mind, is a paradigm example of attributing (to oneself) moral responsibility.
I don’t think that’s quite right, and I’m not sure what Ball is saying but it’s probably related. Biological evolution is not dictated by the laws of physics; a universe could follow the laws of physics and yet not contain enough carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen to make DNA or any relevantly similar genome. Laws of biology, psychology, etc. depend on physical details that, to a physicist, are not laws at all, just coincidental facts.
Of course, it would take a lot more argument to connect this with free will. I doubt many will be satisfied with Ball’s argument.
Meh, top down causality is nonsense. There is no such thing as domains as Platonic classes. They are constructed from each other. As I tried to explain in the previous post classical mechanics and quantum mechanics are different domains but they are not separate things. Classical mechanics is composed of quantum mechanics. There are no questions that classical mechanics answers correctly but quantum mechanics gets wrong. But the reverse is not true because classical mechanics is only an approximation that is only close to correct in a limited domain.
Why do you insist on “explaining”. You are new here and I ask you to read the posting rules: do not try to dominate threads. If your comments exceed 10% of the comments on a post, you’re probably posting too often.
I’m sorry if it seems that I dominate the discussion. It is not my intent. I only seek a conversation which requires a back and forth. I don’t think the number of posts I have made would be in the least unusual on any other blog or forum I have visited. But it is your blog and your rules and I will try to obey.
I am not new here. I was here when you retired and long before.
Again, sorry if I have been a disruption.
And thus, brothers and sisters, friends and comrades, I endeth my lucubrations on the lucubrations of Brother Ball.
Uh … or is “sermon” still a better term, the right term?
My free will makes me hesitate to decide.
Only a loony Democrat would argue that someone/something would still make Mitch McConnell fry if a quantum movement in his neurons makes him reject the call for Trump’s impeachment.
If Ball is claiming physics laws are propagating a clockwork universe process since the hot Big Bang he hasn’t paid attention. Physicists don’t generally think that happens, apart from phyicists that modify working quantum physics into a deterministic Many World model and/or a so called philosophic “block universe”.
To complete my analysis regarding the philosophic notions surrounding the proposition of “free will” – pushing a magical religious “soul” into a percieved gap of nature – and how they relate to physics, I can tack “compatibilism” on.
To recapitulate, whether or not we cluster processes into into deterministic “clockwork universe/Laplace demon” and random “stochastic”, they propagate under physics law. And the biological template is that we have evolved the propensity to interpret the bodily behavior we call “decisions” as a product of conscious rather than unconscious processes. It may have the advantage to ease analysis, a generalization of “agent detection” of dangerous (or social) animal behavior.
A physics compatible model would be that we can do so with impunity – it evolved! For instance, renormalization theory [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renormalization ] makes it impossible to model different energy scales without doing experiments even if we know the particle physics at a fundamental level. That problem is explicitly not of stochasticity but of renormalization “emergence”.
Translating that back to the philosophic notions it isn’t “compatibilism” but it effectively comes out as such. Physics – and evolution – forces me to make that point.
If the discussion is on the philosophic notions or – better – physical compatibility of the evolved trait (propensity to interpret actions as consciously “decided”) – it doesn’t matter.
If the discussion is on prison reform, I am glad to have statistics and that they enable a conclusion.
I wonder if observations on compatibility of physical compatibility will be named philosophical “meta-compatibilism”? Philosophy has a tendency to go meta.
I am not aware of an active thread or email address to add suggestions on the site functionality, but these two article parts suggests improvements:
1. The comment text box could display a word count and warn if we approach the 600 words of Da Roolz’s book. Or simply display a “word remaining count”. Of course we have editors during composing that can do that but I often pull out a simple one for speed and in any case we may modify during the “Edit” time.
2. It could do the same for links. And rool #11 could be explicit on that there seems to be a <=3 limit.
3. Under no circumstance should such rule breaking forward the comment to the approval queue – which I currently suspect it does – but just refuse posting it and let us figure out why. It could flash "Read Da Roolz [you knucklehead]" and/or the problem count for clarity.
Concerning your comment “absolutely destroys the libertarian notion of free will held by most people (and nearly all Abrahamic religionists).
This description does not do justice to Islamic theology as the following brief introduction by Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad: Free Will vs. Determinism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xC1gY0-Zcc
Of the three positions discussed, the Ashar’i position appears to be consistent with modern physics and moral accountability.
What a tedious lecture; why did you make me listen to it? And no, there’s no resolution in Asharism, just a nonscientific religious assertion that God makes everything happen because God so wills it. It’s not at all consistent with modern physics, just tedious theological speculation.
You say “It’s not at all consistent with modern physics” Why?
“In other words, physics, which Ball admits has to comport with everything at a “higher level”, can’t deliver willed action. Thus, if you construe free will in the libertarian, you-could-have-done-otherwise sense, then Ball’s arguments show that we don’t have it.”
The past ccannot be changed, ok. And what about the future?
Can we say something like
In other words, physics, which Ball admits has to comport with everything at a “higher level”, can’t deliver willed action. Thus, if you construe free will in the libertarian, you-will-be-able-to-do-otherwise sense, then Ball’s arguments show that we don’t have it.
So we can change the future as much as the past: zero. That includes prison reform.
Also, lawmakers, police and executioners, could not have made otherwise. Don’t reproach them.
And they won’t be able to do otherwise (or is the future exempt from determinism)
And if we don’t have willed action, ok. But then, why elections, why free marriage, why divorce?
These are my central questions:
can we change the future? (reformism goes out of the window)
does it make sense to apprehend that crooks couldn’t act otherwise but police, prosecuters, judges, hangpersons, could? (prison reform goes out of the window)
what else goes out of the window if there is no possible counterfactual? (willed marriage, willed divorce, periodic elections…)
Finally, you use words like accept or admits, which sound as though he could have refused, together with yout reproachful tone, make me think you really think he should, and therefore could, think otherwise.