Interesting because it messes with the school of thought that everything is determined already and we're just following a sequence of actions that arise from the starting conditions of the universe. If causality is broken then maybe we have free will?
That's a very lazy school of thought though. It's just atheistic Calvinism, a tautology masquerading as a "philosophy".
Calvin believed in pre-destination (your fate and every decision you make is decided before you exist) on the grounds that, because God exists and is omnipotent, what you are doing must therefore be what God wants to happen, both good and bad. After all, God is omnipotent, so there you go.
Today's Calvinists just replace God-driven destiny with nature-driven destiny, but the underlying tautology (X exists, therefore X was always destined to exist, as proven by the fact that it exists at all) remains the same. In fact, it's an arguably more ignorant version of Calvinism, because it requires that one completely dismisses any knowledge they have of probability theory. So it's the "smarter" Calvinism that requires you be ignorant of 20th century mathematical advances.
Hate that crap. The only people I hear talking about it are silicon valley utopians, which is probably the other reason I hate it.
> In fact, it's an arguably more ignorant version of Calvinism, because it requires that one completely dismisses any knowledge they have of probability theory. So it's the "smarter" Calvinism that requires you be ignorant of 20th century mathematical advances.
I entirely fail to see how probability theory means it's impossible for the universe to be deterministic.
> In fact, it's an arguably more ignorant version of Calvinism, because it requires that one completely dismisses any knowledge they have of probability theory
No to pick too many nits, but I think it is well established that knowledge of formal sciences (i.e. mathematics) does not impart knowledge about natural sciences (i.e. physics). While maths a useful tool, there are no established rules of inference for reality, and without rules of inference you can't really make claims on infinite sets.
Natural sciences allow us to find mathematical constructs that make good predictions within specific constraints or that have not yet been falsified, just because something is true in probability theory does not make it true in reality.
Scott Aaronson's "Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine" tackled this question in a way I found enlightening. It's a bit of a dense read (I needed a plane trip to sit down and focus on it), but it presents a compelling case for the possible reversal of time arrows when it comes to the effects of quantum indeterminism on macro scale interactions. In short: what if humans, somehow, someway, have the ability to "influence" the resolution of unobserved universal start-state quantum noise in order to affect our "will" onto the universe? Furthermore, what experiments could be done to validate or invalidate aspects of this hypothesis?
That seems crazy - that my decision to have a ham sandwich for lunch had to be propagated all the way back to the start of the universe in order to happen ;)
And yes, provability is a major problem with all these kinds of theories. We don't have a parallel universe handy as a control, and just saying "I am not going to have a ham sandwich tomorrow" isn't a viable experiment.
I interpret it as a sort of entropic antennae... each person (brain? qbit?) is tuned into what might be considered an allocated "entropy bandwidth". Some decisions, like whether you eat a ham bandwidth tomorrow utilize* practically none of that bandwidth. Others, what you might consider "major life decisions" might utilize* a ton of bandwidth. Some people might be gifted with a "larger" antennae, allowing them to utilize* a higher amount of entropy per second, or per lifetime. We might call these great artists, or generally any genius-level intellectuals. Alternatively, bat-shit crazy people.
*: On "utilize". A central debate (the central debate?) seems to be what sort of "state access mechanism" this maps to in our lexicon: "{reading|writing} {global|local|shared} {bandwidth|memory}"
>had to be propagated all the way back to the start of the universe in order to happen ;)
Technically, casualty required that anyway. My understanding that it's infinity in space, not time that matters here. i.e. predicting your decision to have a ham sandwich may require predicting the entire universe and since we're part of the universe and can't look from 'outside' that decision would be unpredictable from inside the universe.
>And yes, provability is a major problem with all these kinds of theories.
I think showing that quantum effects are negligible for human brains would do, at least regarding your decision to have a ham sandwich?
Mmm, not really unpredictable, it is easy for thought exercises to avoid the dirty real world, but in the real world, Large Language Models have recently proven that many quite difficult abstract probability exercises, when taken to the real world and applying training, can be succesfully solved well beyond our most wildly expectations of precision, speed and accuracy.
So yes, the prediction of the decision to have a ham sandwich tomorrow, for any given person is now, by the state of the art of applied mathematics and information science, a relative doable - if not plain easy - feat.
And according to some hypothesis, the brain could be doing this exactly kind of predictions, even more better than LLMs, with more accuracy/speed using way less energy.
> the prediction of the decision to have a ham sandwich tomorrow, for any given person is now, by the state of the art of applied mathematics and information science, a relative doable - if not plain easy - feat.
Sure, the LLM may be able to guess by reasoning (e.g. 'He always eats ham sandwiches for breakfast and he probably wouldn't break his routine'), the same way we could guess at another person's behaviour, but we're talking about reducing the brain into a deterministic input/output machine, which is a far larger ask.
Now if you said 'doable' that may be right in the long term, but 'easy'? Absolutely not. There's no current way to feed 'me' or 'you' into an equivalent LLM. The human brain has more axons then there are stars in the galaxy and we are nowhere close to even mapping these connections.
>The brain could be doing this exactly kind of predictions, even more better than LLMs, with more accuracy/speed using way less energy.
That's definitely an option. The fact that many of the brain's operations could be done by LLMs is a strike against the original thesis.
The compatibilist view is that there is no contradiction between free will and determinism, because free will refers to macro states and determinism refers to micro states.
In addition, in the many-worlds view of quantum mechanics, we don’t follow just a single sequence of events, but all physically possible sequences of events, where the points where sequences branch off each other can correspond to different decisions we “freely” took. Meaning, when we make a decision, all applicable options of choice will become actual reality.
Compatibilism is a fancy way of saying "free will so much does not exist that what determists call free will isn't even a valid definition to use as a starting point for investigating an answer." It's not an answer to the question, it's a denial of it.
Another, simpler interpretation of Compatibilism is "if free will doesn't exist, then believing it exists or not has 0 effect on anything, because our beliefs are predetermined, and so at human scales the answers Yes and No are equivalent in all observable ways".
So my decision to have a ham sandwich for lunch is determined by some meta-universe that created the starting conditions for this universe, and allows for the breach in causality? Or somehow is involved in the backwards-arrow of quantum events that the article talks about so the universe cannot turn out any other way?
I dunno, seems like a "God of the gaps" thing - we can speculate on meta-meta-universes endlessly. Including one where my decision to have a ham sandwich disturbs the state of a yet higher dimension that sets the starting parameters of your higher dimension and once again I have free will.
Right, physicists seem to generally agree there are parts or dimensions of the universe we cannot directly measure. If scientists can't predict whether you will eat a ham sandwich for lunch or not, it won't be clear if they can't predict it because you have "free will" or because we have limited access to information on how the universe works.
Causality isn't broken; the universe is "simultaneously causal and teleological," because it's superdetermined.
There also isn't any free will, because there isn't actually any agent who could have it. Actions we perceive as volitional actually arise in the brain up to 7s before we "choose" them. The sense of a "me" is a post hoc add-on that claims credit for everything, in order to unite the disparate phenomena that comprise the sense of self.
There isn't actually any "me," and recognizing this is what the word "enlightenment" refers to.
> There also isn't any free will, because there isn't actually any agent who could have it.
The compilation of each possible Play in an Extensive Normal Form Game into a cellular automata can constitute a refutation by counterexample of your claim. It satisfies the agent condition through congruence with the technical language defining the concept of agent in artificial intelligence literature as it relates to agents in multi-agent multi-step decision theory problems. The condition of non-deterministic policies is found and shown to be optimal by Nash's justification for an mixed strategy equilibrium. The underlying mathematics that leads there is proven via Russel and there exists various proofs of the desiderata of probability from others which can begin atop that. Furthermore by compiling the formal system to get a physical system we create the ability for a logical analogy between the formal system and the physical system through Aristotle's analogical congruence concepts. We can count the cell configurations and we can count the transitional structure, but this is mostly a formality since we know through the definition of the compilation that they must agree. As far as I can tell at every single step in the laddering up there are proofs from the basics of logic to the mathematics to the use of probability to the justification through utility theory and even to the computational universality necessary to create the physical embedding of the agent in our reality.
The prior conception of guess appears laughable posterior to computation and comparison with evidence, but is just science prior and seeing it is wrong is hindsight bias posterior. It might sound laughable, but it is actually the case that it is not a laughing matter [1]. In like manner, but slightly different and perilously close to being anti-scientific is that you don't know until the observation whether guesses would go one way or another.
I'm saying your self-concept is only a useful abstraction. It's an evolutionally beneficial illusion that there is any entity called "me" that chooses which action comes next.
The mathematics of intelligence in multi-agent decision problems implication gives us informed guesses about what we should expect to see if an agent has free will versus if they don't. You are arguing with words like illusion, so I don't think you realize this, but what you actually need to provide to have your actual position be the consequence of experimental evidence is evidence of extreme compression being possible. Illusion? It is the evidence for agents, not evidence against agents, according to the theory informed guesses.
There is this story about a village of blind men and elephants. You are like a blind man from that village, saying that the elephant must be abstract because you felt a footprint of the elephant. Try playing with an elephant carving. It predicts footprints when you press it it into the ground. You can totally guess before you touch the elephant on the basis of the carving. The decision to focus on the untestable is a commitment to a hindsight fallacy which experimental investigation would likely refute.
I get what you are trying to say, but it isn't true. This is the long version that explains why and goes through the implications at each step showing the hypothesis, predictions they make, and why your views don't make sense. You should read this if you don't think my other post makes sense, but if it just clicks you don't need to read this.
H0: Free will predicts in advance of a decision problem that when a decision problem is resolved you cannot always predict the result.
H1: A lack of free will predicts of a decision problem that when a decision problem is resolved you can always have predicted the result in advance of the result, because there was only one possible resolution.
Complete Refutation of H1: The existence of halting problems. A self-reference in a decision problem refutes H1, because the self-reference
Additional strong evidence against H1: All the most successful epistemological frameworks suppose a superposition over positions which on attaining information about the next position resolves, not to a position, but to a new superposition. For example science does this. It believes we don't know for certain the theories, but we conjecture guesses and use observations to test them.
Implication of failure of H1 and the failure to refute H0: There exists a self-reference, a sort of self-concept, which prevents the resolution of a prediction prior to the resolution. Self-reference exists as a thing which must be computed.
Okay. So now we pick back up in the mathematics that deals with self-reference in game theory. In it we find equilibrium concepts which are defined with respect to self-reference and proven relative to self-reference considerations. These proofs show that the solution structure contingent on self-reference is non-deterministic.
Implication: Not only does self-reference exist, but the consequences of self-reference is the use of self-reference to refute self-referential prediction or to support self-referential prediction on the basis of utility of doing so or not doing so.
So now we know a self-reference must exist, we also know it predicts a refutation in some cases of the ability to predict it. We can also see that if the self-reference didn't exist, it would imply that there was no structure which wasn't computationally irreducible like self-reference structures are.
H3: We will see everything is predictable from the information contexts available, because agents don't exist. Example predictions: that all physics will be determinable like the position of a planet is determinable.
H4: We will that some things are not predictable, because of the existence of illusions that prevent resolution and which contain a self-reference consideration.
What we actually observe is H4. We observe H4 in at least one case, so we can't infer from H3 that we can reject H4, because H4 already rejects the safety of H3.
Let me give an example: Some deer in Africa don't see orange. Tigers, to us, are orange. To the deer they are green. The tiger color is decided by a self-reference consideration with the deer perceptual system. The deer is not going to be able to predict the future state of all tiger like we could predict the planets, because the deer is caught in a superposition with respect to a tiger's presence. When it observes a tiger, this looks the same as observing a bush. Therefore, even if it sees a bush, it can't predict that it can always model the consequence of a bush. Therefore, if we see a planet, it is incorrect to assume we can always predict the consequences of seeing a planet.
So now you can understand, if my other comment didn't click, why appeals to illusion are actually evidence for self-reference, not evidence against it. So feel free to read that comment again to see if it now clicks.
And yet doesn't it defy probability that such raw physical determinism would lead to us having this discussion? And if not, is it not amazing that simple subatomic physical applied to a gaseous soup leads to us discussing these questions?
To the first question, not in the least. This discussion is also superdetermined, including the illusory sense of a "me" who "chose" to write these comments.
To the second question, yes. It's beyond comprehension and wondrous. It's maximum novelty and total absurdity.
Might be worth it to brush up on computationally reducible phenomenon and computationally irreducible phenomenon. Breaking determined systems into these constituent parts lets you conjecture with respect to intelligent agents. Critically it shows that arguments from observed inability to successfully model the self are evidence for, not evidence against, the presence of an intelligent agent. The enlightenment view misattributes the evidence for agents as evidence against agents.
An anti-enlightenment koan could be: The student came to the master and asked, “Why are tigers green?” The master responded, “The deer they are hunting can’t see orange.” The student then asked, “It is not therefore it is? How mysterious and inscrutable your answers!” But from that moment onwards the master was de-enlightened.
Again this seems like a "God of the gaps" thing - if this universe isn't strictly deterministic then it's superdetermined by a meta universe, and so on
I think it's the opposite. You need a "God of the gaps" in the form of a "person" (actually a collection of phenomena. + the phenomena of identification with these) to explain free will and agency, which defies experimental evidence.
The comment that superdeterminism requires a higher-order determinism, which itself requires a yet-higher-order determinism... I think you're confusing it with a causal mindset. If the universe is effectively a recording, why does it need any ultimate cause? Causal thinking would only make sense from a perspective within that recording.
Of course we want to know "why is any of this here?" But what if the ultimate question doesn't actually have an answer?
My favorite sentence on free will comes from Chomsky (who I think was probably quoting someone else): "if we don't have free will, then why are you arguing the point?"
