I confess I dissolved the “free will” question for myself rather than about determinism/non-determinism, but I did think about determinism/nondeterminism in the course of it.
Basically, imagine you’re designing a universe, what are the alternatives to determinism? Determinism and non-determinism both fully allow for free agency; whether who you are can be predicted effectively or not, and to what degree, meaningful states of the universe are caused by who you are.
The quickest alternative is stochastic; elements of the universe are random, to some degree, such that a perfect prediction is impossible not only by measurement but inherently. Here we’ve got the distinction between a highly complicated function and … a highly complicated function that consults for input a series of dice rolls. There’s potentially good functional reasons to include this if you happen to be designing a universe, but metaphysically, it doesn’t feel much different from the perfectly predictable universe from the inside. The main advantage is we can imagine counterfactual universes exist or could have existed, depending how those dice rolls are implemented. However, it’s arguable this is still deterministic—just with our universe spread out to predictable probability distributions rather than a more singular timeline. And to my understanding particles do act like this; which, speculatively, might be one of the more useful levels of physics to inject noise for diverse results. I think this could be meaningfully true, and give us a better universe than if it were not true, but it in no way dissolves nihilistic consideration.
Another alternative could be outside-view meddling: the universe itself is predictable, so you can see the whole thing/whole probability cloud of it, but if you aren’t content with its outputs you can tweak something to adjust the whole state after (time of what was tweaked). The universe itself remains predictable, but from a timeless causal perspective is able to be altered by outside forces, whose determinism or lack thereof we can’t guess much about directly because measuring outside space, time, and our local laws of physics is inherently challenging. In this case, the determinism of the superset of our universe and meddling forces depends on what the determinism-state of the outside meddlers is, which is unmeasurable to us currently (but might be communicated). Bargaining with these outside forces could be meaningful, but we have no way to tell, so it does not fully dissolve nihilism either.
Last alternative is things happen for no cause whatsoever, dice roll or otherwise. (Though we have reasonable evidence that things do happen for reasons also, so this is not the dominant influence.) Sometimes the universe just spawns events with no probability that can be calculated and they are incorporated. We should expect to see some form of fluctuations that continually defy attempts to fit sensible probability estimates to them as a category. This would not easily be part of a universe we could design ourselves, because implementing ‘and things happen for no reason’ contains an inherent paradox; the feature inherently has to exist without implementation. This does not exactly dissolve the nihilistic perspective to me, either.
Essentially, I do not think nihilism as a perspective can be dissolved either by determinism or by a lack of determinism. The question of meaning is orthogonal to whether we are implemented predictably or unpredictably.
If we go back to theology, for a moment: Some wrestled with this, in the form of predestination. If whether you will “go to Heaven” (insert equivalent desired universe state) is predetermined, does it matter which action you take? And the answer they came up with was yes: it matters, because how you act now reflects what state you are predestined for. Just because someone can in theory step out of time and “see” where you wound up 20 years from now, you don’t get there without having actively taken every causal step on the way to that 20 years from now. If the future of the universe can be predicted from the current state—act so that the state you are predicting is the desired one.
Determinism and non-determinism both fully allow for free agency
Determinism doesn’t allow for agency free from… determinism.
metaphysically, it doesn’t feel much different from the perfectly predictable universe from the inside
But it’s different from the outside, because the future is no longer predetetmined and inevitable.
This would not easily be part of a universe we could design ourselves, because implementing ‘and things happen for no reason’ contains an inherent paradox; the feature inherently has to exist without implementation.
Are you saying that we can’t build a genuinely stochastic simulated universe within a determinist universe?
Essentially, I do not think nihilism as a perspective can be dissolved either by determinism or by a lack of determinism
If meaningfulness, non-nihilism, depends on being able to make a difference, determinism stymies it.
I’m saying stochastic processes still entail a distribution of probability for the random events; where events with no cause would not have a probability distribution. Like if we implemented a 1% chance of spawning a particle every minute; that particle spawned because there was a 1% chance of spawning a particle; rather than “for no reason”.
Yes, stochastic processes would have a probability distribution. The question is how that connects to the issues of free will and nihilism.
Like if we implemented a 1% chance of spawning a particle every minute; that particle spawned because there was a 1% chance of spawning a particle; rather than “for no reason”.
So there is a reason in that particular sense.
Causal determinism is a form of causality, clearly enough. But not all causality is deterministic , since indeterministic causality can be coherently defined. For instance: “An indeterministic cause raises the probability of its effect, but doesn’t raise it to certainty”. Far from being novel, or exotic, this is a familiar way of looking at causality. We all know that smoking causes cancer, and we all know that you can smoke without getting cancer...so the “causes” in “smoking causes cancer” must mean “increased the risk of”.
Something cannot occur without a necessary cause or precondition. Something cannot fail to occur if it has a sufficient cause. An example of a necessary cause is oxygen in relation to fires: no fire can occur without oxygen, but oxygen can occur without a fire. It would strange to describe a fire as starting because of oxygen—necessary causes aren’t the default concept of causality. The determinism versus free will debate is much more about sufficient causes, because a sufficient cause has to bring about its effect, making it inevitable.
But why would a libertarian worry about the lack of a cause that isnt a sufficient cause?Libertarians dont have to object to necessary causes, or probablistic causes, because neither removes their “elbow room”, or ability to have done otherwise.
And … for you, I’ll delve into my actual thoughts on free will and agency, a bit.
Basically, if I look at what I would want to determine my agency, it looks more like determinism than it does the other options.
Imagine I am an algorithm, in either a predictable or an unpredictable universe.
Determinism takes into account every facet of who I am, my circumstances and history and desires and goals, and uses it to generate results. The fact that I know there is a future result which will happen based on my actions and state empowers me to act in the present, in order to have impact on the future. The fact that the past shaped my circumstances allows me to contextualize, reflect and explain myself, to myself.
Whether I have a past that caused me is perhaps less important than having a future I cause, to this question.
If I am in a universe that is more stochastic, I picture being run a hundred times; and picking, say, one action 87% of the time, another answer 10% of the time, and a third answer 3% of the time. Is this choice more ‘free’? No. It is noise. It is living with the fact that 13% of the time, I pick the ‘wrong’ answer according to my own probability distribution, and get shunted into a possible universe that is less me. Perhaps this is the case. I argue that I am less free here than in a deterministic universe.
(Simplified. It probably happens at a low enough level to correct for it later, if it does, and has better results than I am imagining. But we know the actual results must be the same for the hypothetical, because the universe is as we observe it, whether predictable or not.)
The fact that I know there is a future result which will happen based on my actions and state empowers me to act in the present, in order to have impact on the future.
The fact that your state, your actions are, and the results of your actions are all determined, means that you can’t impact the future in the sense of helping to bring about one non-inevitable future rather than another.
I “could” have chosen something else in the first case, too, in the ways I care about. C was a meaningful action, within my capabilities and in my consideration. I simply did not choose it; and consistently would not choose it every time I was put in the same world state.
Additionally, I “could not” have chosen something else in the second case, in the ways I care about. The random variation was not meaningfully under my control. Dice chose C for me as much as I chose C for me.
Edit: If you do happen to strongly prefer the second case, it is within your power to defer decisions you are uncertain about to the most likely sources of randomness/stochasticity in our universe: random numbers generated based on quantum fluctuations. Explicitly establish your probabilities for each option, then roll the dice.
I “could” have chosen something else in the first case
But not in reality. “Could”, not could.
The random variation was not meaningfully under my control
It’s true that you can’t pre-determine an internal dice roll as if you an extra-physical entity that controls the physical events in your brain, but deteminism doesnt give you that kind of control either. If you are your brain , the question is whether your brain has freedom, control , etc, not whether “you” control “it”, as if you were two separate entities. And as a physical self, basicaly identical to the brain, you can still exert after-the-fact control over an internal coin toss...filter or gatekeep it, as it were. The entire brain is not obliged to make a response based on a single deterministic neural event, so it’s not obliged to make a response based on a single indeterministic neural event.
I can filter or gatekeep as many deterministic neural events as I can indeterministic neural events. The main distinction from the perspective of me-as-a-complicated-function is that more stochastic noise in the lower levels gives me more slightly different (but, as you suggest, still coherent with ‘me’) results from running into very similar situations repeatedly. Which is … probably functionally helpful? But to the extent free will exists as emergent agency in the (partially!) indeterminate situation, it also exists in the deterministic situation, for the same reasons.
I can filter or gatekeep as many deterministic neural events as I can indeterministic neural events
Of course.
But to the extent free will exists as emergent agency in the (partially!) indeterminate situation, it also exists in the deterministic situation, for the same reasons.
No, because there is no longer the ability to have done otherwise.
I confess I dissolved the “free will” question for myself rather than about determinism/non-determinism, but I did think about determinism/nondeterminism in the course of it.
Basically, imagine you’re designing a universe, what are the alternatives to determinism? Determinism and non-determinism both fully allow for free agency; whether who you are can be predicted effectively or not, and to what degree, meaningful states of the universe are caused by who you are.
The quickest alternative is stochastic; elements of the universe are random, to some degree, such that a perfect prediction is impossible not only by measurement but inherently. Here we’ve got the distinction between a highly complicated function and … a highly complicated function that consults for input a series of dice rolls. There’s potentially good functional reasons to include this if you happen to be designing a universe, but metaphysically, it doesn’t feel much different from the perfectly predictable universe from the inside. The main advantage is we can imagine counterfactual universes exist or could have existed, depending how those dice rolls are implemented. However, it’s arguable this is still deterministic—just with our universe spread out to predictable probability distributions rather than a more singular timeline. And to my understanding particles do act like this; which, speculatively, might be one of the more useful levels of physics to inject noise for diverse results. I think this could be meaningfully true, and give us a better universe than if it were not true, but it in no way dissolves nihilistic consideration.
Another alternative could be outside-view meddling: the universe itself is predictable, so you can see the whole thing/whole probability cloud of it, but if you aren’t content with its outputs you can tweak something to adjust the whole state after (time of what was tweaked). The universe itself remains predictable, but from a timeless causal perspective is able to be altered by outside forces, whose determinism or lack thereof we can’t guess much about directly because measuring outside space, time, and our local laws of physics is inherently challenging. In this case, the determinism of the superset of our universe and meddling forces depends on what the determinism-state of the outside meddlers is, which is unmeasurable to us currently (but might be communicated). Bargaining with these outside forces could be meaningful, but we have no way to tell, so it does not fully dissolve nihilism either.
Last alternative is things happen for no cause whatsoever, dice roll or otherwise. (Though we have reasonable evidence that things do happen for reasons also, so this is not the dominant influence.) Sometimes the universe just spawns events with no probability that can be calculated and they are incorporated. We should expect to see some form of fluctuations that continually defy attempts to fit sensible probability estimates to them as a category. This would not easily be part of a universe we could design ourselves, because implementing ‘and things happen for no reason’ contains an inherent paradox; the feature inherently has to exist without implementation. This does not exactly dissolve the nihilistic perspective to me, either.
Essentially, I do not think nihilism as a perspective can be dissolved either by determinism or by a lack of determinism. The question of meaning is orthogonal to whether we are implemented predictably or unpredictably.
If we go back to theology, for a moment: Some wrestled with this, in the form of predestination. If whether you will “go to Heaven” (insert equivalent desired universe state) is predetermined, does it matter which action you take? And the answer they came up with was yes: it matters, because how you act now reflects what state you are predestined for. Just because someone can in theory step out of time and “see” where you wound up 20 years from now, you don’t get there without having actively taken every causal step on the way to that 20 years from now. If the future of the universe can be predicted from the current state—act so that the state you are predicting is the desired one.
Determinism doesn’t allow for agency free from… determinism.
But it’s different from the outside, because the future is no longer predetetmined and inevitable.
Are you saying that we can’t build a genuinely stochastic simulated universe within a determinist universe?
If meaningfulness, non-nihilism, depends on being able to make a difference, determinism stymies it.
I’m saying stochastic processes still entail a distribution of probability for the random events; where events with no cause would not have a probability distribution. Like if we implemented a 1% chance of spawning a particle every minute; that particle spawned because there was a 1% chance of spawning a particle; rather than “for no reason”.
Yes, stochastic processes would have a probability distribution. The question is how that connects to the issues of free will and nihilism.
So there is a reason in that particular sense.
Causal determinism is a form of causality, clearly enough. But not all causality is deterministic , since indeterministic causality can be coherently defined. For instance: “An indeterministic cause raises the probability of its effect, but doesn’t raise it to certainty”. Far from being novel, or exotic, this is a familiar way of looking at causality. We all know that smoking causes cancer, and we all know that you can smoke without getting cancer...so the “causes” in “smoking causes cancer” must mean “increased the risk of”.
Something cannot occur without a necessary cause or precondition. Something cannot fail to occur if it has a sufficient cause. An example of a necessary cause is oxygen in relation to fires: no fire can occur without oxygen, but oxygen can occur without a fire. It would strange to describe a fire as starting because of oxygen—necessary causes aren’t the default concept of causality. The determinism versus free will debate is much more about sufficient causes, because a sufficient cause has to bring about its effect, making it inevitable.
But why would a libertarian worry about the lack of a cause that isnt a sufficient cause?Libertarians dont have to object to necessary causes, or probablistic causes, because neither removes their “elbow room”, or ability to have done otherwise.
And … for you, I’ll delve into my actual thoughts on free will and agency, a bit.
Basically, if I look at what I would want to determine my agency, it looks more like determinism than it does the other options.
Imagine I am an algorithm, in either a predictable or an unpredictable universe.
Determinism takes into account every facet of who I am, my circumstances and history and desires and goals, and uses it to generate results. The fact that I know there is a future result which will happen based on my actions and state empowers me to act in the present, in order to have impact on the future. The fact that the past shaped my circumstances allows me to contextualize, reflect and explain myself, to myself.
Whether I have a past that caused me is perhaps less important than having a future I cause, to this question.
If I am in a universe that is more stochastic, I picture being run a hundred times; and picking, say, one action 87% of the time, another answer 10% of the time, and a third answer 3% of the time. Is this choice more ‘free’? No. It is noise. It is living with the fact that 13% of the time, I pick the ‘wrong’ answer according to my own probability distribution, and get shunted into a possible universe that is less me. Perhaps this is the case. I argue that I am less free here than in a deterministic universe.
(Simplified. It probably happens at a low enough level to correct for it later, if it does, and has better results than I am imagining. But we know the actual results must be the same for the hypothetical, because the universe is as we observe it, whether predictable or not.)
The fact that your state, your actions are, and the results of your actions are all determined, means that you can’t impact the future in the sense of helping to bring about one non-inevitable future rather than another.
Yet I can impact the future in the sense of helping to bring about one inevitable future rather than something that will not happen.
But you can’t impact the future in any greater sense. You can call the two things by the same name, but they’re ni the same.
There is no “greater sense” granted by a lack of predictability.
If I have a 100% chance to generate A ⇒ B; or an 80% chance to generate A ⇒ B and 20% chance to generate A ⇒ C.
I’m not meaningfully choosing B more in the second option more than the first option. More the opposite.
Yes you are, because you could have chosen something else in the second case. A choice between one isn’t a choice
I “could” have chosen something else in the first case, too, in the ways I care about. C was a meaningful action, within my capabilities and in my consideration. I simply did not choose it; and consistently would not choose it every time I was put in the same world state.
Additionally, I “could not” have chosen something else in the second case, in the ways I care about. The random variation was not meaningfully under my control. Dice chose C for me as much as I chose C for me.
Edit: If you do happen to strongly prefer the second case, it is within your power to defer decisions you are uncertain about to the most likely sources of randomness/stochasticity in our universe: random numbers generated based on quantum fluctuations. Explicitly establish your probabilities for each option, then roll the dice.
But not in reality. “Could”, not could.
It’s true that you can’t pre-determine an internal dice roll as if you an extra-physical entity that controls the physical events in your brain, but deteminism doesnt give you that kind of control either. If you are your brain , the question is whether your brain has freedom, control , etc, not whether “you” control “it”, as if you were two separate entities. And as a physical self, basicaly identical to the brain, you can still exert after-the-fact control over an internal coin toss...filter or gatekeep it, as it were. The entire brain is not obliged to make a response based on a single deterministic neural event, so it’s not obliged to make a response based on a single indeterministic neural event.
I can filter or gatekeep as many deterministic neural events as I can indeterministic neural events. The main distinction from the perspective of me-as-a-complicated-function is that more stochastic noise in the lower levels gives me more slightly different (but, as you suggest, still coherent with ‘me’) results from running into very similar situations repeatedly. Which is … probably functionally helpful? But to the extent free will exists as emergent agency in the (partially!) indeterminate situation, it also exists in the deterministic situation, for the same reasons.
Of course.
No, because there is no longer the ability to have done otherwise.