I’m still waiting for the guy with the 2×4.

Suppose I take a model of a deterministic world and map out everything that ever happened and that ever will happen in that world. Every single action on the map is the product of all preceding actions; there is no particular seperation between an action and its immediate causes, and no action originates in itself in any part. I can go through the map and look up the point where someone picks up a rock and throws it (action A) and the point where the rock flies through the air (action B). We would assume action B is a nonfree action triggered by action A… but there is no functional difference between action A and action B. They are thoroughly the same type of action.

In a model of a nondeterministic world, we could still map out everything that had ever happened up to a certain point, although not everything that will happen in the future since that could not be known in advance. The difference would be that the nondeterministic map would have discontinuity; each action would not always be the simple product of its previous actions. A nondeterministic action would have a clear distinction from their prior actions; it would originate in part seperately and uniquely on its own (at least relative to all other actions on the map). This action introduces this random element; that action introduces that random element.

The status of free will would still be indeterminate, yes. But you could take actions A and B again and there could potentially be a difference in type between them: assuming a thoroughly nondeterministic world there would be a small part of action B which was unrelated to prior actions (including A), and a small part of action A which was unrelated to its prior actions. “Free” action A may or may not contain some element that “nonfree” action B does not, but we cannot know whether it does or not since we cannot seperate the nondeterministic part into its constituent elements. But it could, and that is the distinction that I make between a deterministic model and a nondeterministic one.

How?

Like so: “I declare these actions to be mine.”

The final answer here is that there is no test for free will and can never be a test for free will. It’s unprovable and unfalsifiable. You seem to have acknowledged this yourself.

However, the fact that free will cannot be proven bothers people, so they jump onto the imaginary dichotomy of freedom vs. determinism, and try to deny determinism in order to “prove” free will.

My take on it is: it does not matter if we’re free willed or not. It’s the same either way.

As it cannot be proven one way or another… as the results are the same either way… even to the point of free will leading to the same repetition in our “universal rewind” thought experiment that would be present without free will… then we can say that we have free will and be “correct.”

It does not matter on any level whether we are right or wrong… and indeed, the answer to that question does not exist. Our experience is the same whether we have free will or not, because the unvierse is the same whether we have free will or not, because any hypothetical higher agency that is or is not going to condemn or reward us for actions will do so irrespective of whether or not we have free will… the actual existence or non-existence of free will has no impact on anything.

Given all that, I choose to believe that I have free will and am absolutely unperturbed by the lack of proof on the subject.

But in a deterministic world, all actions are equally part of the same predictable, interrelated system. How, out of this essential sameness, can you point to a set of actions as belonging uniquely to you? Even if you were to arbitrarily declare a set of actions as being yours, how do you go about distinguishing your free actions as being free as opposed to the nonfree actions of objects which presumably do not possess free will, if all actions are equally predictable based on all other actions?

He’s saying determinism (in the standard sense) or no determinism, you would still pick the same thing each and every “time”. This is not an infringement on your free agency… it is a vindication of it. Whetever decision you make is valid, in that you made it for whatever reasons you held.

Replay the universe, same outcome, because your decision is still your decision.

For you to do things differently the “second time”, there’d have to be an outside (or random internal) agency impinging upon your actions.

“If there’s only one possible outcome, then there’s no free will.” Underpants Gnome Logic! Where’s the step which connects those two things?

If there is free will, all that means is that your free will is what leads to the decision to zig or zag… your will does not lead to the absence of determinism; instead, it becomes the determinator.

It is my view that any meaningful definition of free will must by necessity include a qualitative distinction between how the behavior of free individuals is determined and how the behavior of nonfree objects is. If both are wholly dependent on the same immutable deterministic physical laws, then any distinction that could be made would be a purely quantitative one. If I pick up a rock and throw it, the mechanics of the thought processes through which this gets carried out are many, many orders of magnitude more complicated than the mechanics of the rock’s flight. But if at a root level they are made up of the same deterministic physical interactions, and my thought processes simply involve more of them, then it becomes difficult if not impossible to define my actions as free in a way that the rock’s are not.

I find I am actually fairly comfortable with randomness, regardless of the source. If neither the rock’s actions nor mine can be predicted through deterministic laws, then my status vis a vis the rock’s is at the very least indeterminate; room exists for a distinction where it would not in a purely deterministic world.

At any rate, I like to think that I am, on the whole, not particularly gloomy about the problem (although I confess I was tying my brain in knots a bit last night), simply because I choose to believe that I can choose to believe. I don’t care if the true nature of the world is ultimately deterministic, even if this would mean that I truly do not have free will, because I can simply believe otherwise.

The statement about quantum uncertainty isn’t as foolish as it’s made to seem. Of course the whole reversal of the universe business is hypothetical, but there is nevertheless something different about resetting me walking to the store and resetting quantum movements. You might play the tape, watch a subatomic particle walk to the store (so to speak), and as you rewind it watch the particle, instead of reversing its motions, buy a baked potato. Unpredictability goes hand in hand with being irreversible; its actions are unpredictable no matter which way time is moving. If you really can’t stand the idea that you have no free will, it’s not hard to convince yourself that this works if it makes you feel better. Science is beginning to progress beyond an outdated Victorian cause-and-effect view, but almost no one is ready to accept it, including the scientists.

If I know that stimuli X, Y, and Z will provoke reaction A from a person, and stimuli W, U, and V will provoke reaction B from a rock, I have a hard time distinguishing one or the other as having more or less free will.

(Of course, maybe I’m just being needlessly pessimistic. Conversely, it could be that rocks share the same free will we do and lead altogether more fulfilling lives than previously thought.)

The only reason we’d have to grant that information within the universe changes because of the rewind is to account for the “some change” that is demanded to account for why decisions might unfold differently, and if that’s your argument all you’re doing is demonstrating once again how “non-determinism” isn’t the same thing as free will. If it takes a random outside change for your decision to change…

Nobody has ever given me a clear answer to why our actions being “set in stone” in this fashion would mean we don’t have free will, except to repeat over and over again “But if a higher agency can perfectly predict our actions, we’re just following a script!” which does not follow at all. I get the emotional reaction to the idea that our actions could be predicted, but the logic doesn’t hold.

If we had a script that we were following in place of free will, then our actions would be predictable, yes… but that doesn’t mean the reverse is true. It’s logic that a child can follow: “I see what I eat” is not “I eat what I see.”

The “cussedness” that Stephen illustrates by insisting that he MIGHT pick something different isn’t necessary because the so-called “deterministic” universe Michael describes is NOT antithetical to freewill.

Yes, I’m kidding. Mostly.

But even if we grant the idea of a higher agency with the power to rewind the entire physical state of the universe to the same decision point, it seems to me that the very act of doing so has to create a change on some level. The idea of a higher agency hitting the rewind button in order to observe the choice made at a certain decision point implies some form of causality. I am having trouble conceiving of a framework in which the rewind could be said not to have occurred in some sense, even if said sense is not evident within the physical state of the universe; if the rewind is allowed to reset the universe into a state in which the rewind has not occured, this seems to me to lead to a paradox.

The only resolution I see is if you further grant the rewind the ability to erase all information relating to the rewind, which means that one, there is no longer any way to determine whether the decision was the same or different as “before” since that information is gone with the rewind; and two, if the world does operate in a deterministic fashion you’ve just totally set up a perpetual loop since the same events leading up to the rewind will still occur, meaning whatever higher agency decided to rewind will do so again.

I guess now we know where Groundhog’s Day came from. Except since that loop eventually got broken, we know that the universe cannot be deterministic, ‘cuz you can’t argue with Bill Murray and Harold Ramis.

So, we get ONE decision… and I am unable to conceptualize a scenario in which it is possible to even determine if we would have potentially made the same decision over again, since any act of observation would require a state change of some sort. Mmm. At the moment this seems to strengthen Michael’s argument, actually, although it’s too late for my brain to stink thraight.