It’s often pointed out how odd it is that the Epicureans believed in a mechanism with some similarity to, at least, an idiot’s understanding of QM: Epicurean atoms, every once in a while, will “swerve” a minimal unit, a movement that cannot possibly be predicted (the rest of the time, their movements are caused exclusively and regularly by gravity and bumping into each other). There wasn’t much good reason for believing this at all, and obviously the Epicureans didn’t have any of the evidence used for quantum theory; I don’t think there’s any trace of a historical connection there.

However, the swerve was central to the Epicurean belief in free will. Which suggests (here’s the actual point) that the relationship between QM and free will isn’t just a case of people grabbing a new scientific theory and inventing a relationship to their philosophical claim: the relationship actually pre-existed the scientific theory; which in turn suggests that the science, now that it’s really supported by evidence, is more likely to be legitimately relevant to the philosophy. Eh?

On another note, I’ve been trying to come up with a plan to tax libertarian for breathing. Do any of my fellow control freaks want to help out with that?

To me the technical apparatus of Davidson (which is essentially empricial & dedicated to a multidisciplinary approach) allows to underpin what e.g. Habermas has to say. It’s clear that the work of showing this has to be done & I can’t do it. I can only hope to get somebody fired up and/or discussing with me; so, don’t shoot me ;-)

(I have to say I find Levinas a bit old hat (as I find John’s style a bit old hat, sorry) and I do not know why we have to revisit such density; it is not even so that he has literary genius, and before you know it you connect to the worst of French philosophy)

John, triangulation is pre-logical – discourse ethics is based on the idea that a person is socially constructed hence the social reality takes precedence over inidviduality – you may be too long for me to respond point by point but length is not a sign of authority – at least not with me

Onymous, I cannot hope to convince you that I understand QM, any more than I was able to convince you that I understand climate science. One needs to know something in order to know what one doesn’t know, and in your case even that much knowledge is clearly lacking.

“Sigh. You really don’t know what you’re talking about, do you? Since you claim to know this stuff, what part of “the wave equation evolves deterministically” don’t you get? I guess the handle was the tip-off that there’d be claims of massive expertise coupled with massive meta/incompetence.”

Deterministically evolving probability distributions are themselves deterministic? You should be a co-author with Tryhard, ScentOfViolence.

But please do carry on. I find the automatic assumption that any outsider must be ignorant a refreshing reminder of why academia has become so irrelevant.

Again, fatalism is not the same as determinism. And any account of agency/”freedom” as strictly finite and constitutively limited involves a considerable burden of fate, though also openness to (the pressure of) the future.

Since you’re “over there” and my parents came from there, (having grown up into the War), I’ll venture to remark that a culturally engrained sense of fatalism is fairly common in your neck-of-the-woods. Over here, the usual default option among the folk is an unreflective and ad hoc assumption of voluntaristic individualism. Which, of course, leads to a kind of compulsive optimism and large doses of denial. If you’d want a simple explanation of how the U.S. financial system caused the global economy to collapse, I blame Prozac!

The issue may come down to a different definition of prediction. From where I’m coming from, if you can play out the situation on paper (construct a Turing machine to simulate it), you can predict it. IIRC Putnam and Penrose thought it was important that there were micro processes that a TM could neither calculate nor simulate. Personally, the existence of irrational numbers, or for that matter infinities countable or uncountable, don’t seem to be of deep significance either. Maybe we’re getting into “taming of chance” territory here.

I think, given that we are talking about physics, your two definitions of determinism amount to the same thing. If, philosophically, you don’t want to restrict yourself to what’s applicable to physics, it would seem you can’t restrict what’s possible by importing the discoveries of physics into your theory (asking whether nor QM introduces indeterminism). If so, you have admitted that in principle higher level events are produced by lower-level, physical events, and that there is no spiritual or mental plane that is not in any way itself physical but produces events in the physical sphere.

There may be all sorts of goodness, by the way, in the sort of thing jch is talking about, but to me it is absurd to require a concession that mental or spiritual events are actual intrusions into the physical. Even more absurd to think that an indeterministic QM is somehow going to be an acceptable substitute for this kind of intrusion.

“Anomalous monism” is O.K. as a limited philosopher’s synoptic account, but the empirical, causal details matter, even if they’re more-than-astronomically complex, and these questions are mostly a matter for neuro-physiology in an evolutionary framework, rather than for “philosophy of mind”. As for the rest of Davidson, I’m ambivalent. I don’t think Tarski’s truth-conditional semantics can be adequately applied to natural language, (and neither did Tarski). I tend to regard Davidson as on a step program of recovery from Quine. At any rate, it was only at the end of his career that he recognized any affinity with Gadamer’s conception of interpretation.

Whitehead, I feel, has been unjustly neglected, perhaps because his work ran into the hegemonic heyday of logical positivism. Though much of what he was getting at with his odd revisionary “metaphysical” vocabulary, nowadays might be put more formally and precisely in terms of general systems theory.

Habermas’ “discourse ethics” is a part of an attempt at a systematic theory of social rationality/rational societies. I kinda lost the thread of him after TCA and haven’t followed out his later elaborations, though I would prefer a hermeneutically thicker and more conflicted account, rather than such an over-riding emphasis on “universal” consensus as the basis for social reality. But he’s rather OT here.

There is no Essential Other in Levinas, and he’s worlds away from either Davidson or Habermas. He’s working at a “primordial”, pre-logical level, working against Heidegger and Hegel, though peculiarly entangled with them. The other is neither an object, nor a presence, nor a phenomenal appearance, but a paradoxically non-appearing phenomenon, an enigma rather than something that can be consensually objective. The exteriority of the self in the “face” of the other is “prior” to any interiority, which could “constitute” a coherent object-world, “intersubjectivity”, and “preoccupies” it, which is very much the point: an ethics of the divided rather than self-referring-and-cohering self.

Of course, I get irritated and impatient with a lot of this Analytic “philosophy of mind” stuff and the way its problematics get set-up and the “arm-chair” approaches. The obsession with the causal basis of “mind” relying solely on prior logical analysis rather than looking at the empirical sorts of causality that might do is especially unfortunate. And, following on Hegel’s “Geist”, “mind” is as much a socio-cultural phenomenon as a biological one: “mind” does not equal brain, for all that they are peculiarly intertwined. But it’s also an entirely contingent phenomenon, like life itself: an account of “mind” tells us nothing about the “deep” structure of the universe, and there is no way the universe must be, so that mind must be, though conversely there may be ways “mind” must be, given the way the universe is. QM, needless to say, has nothing to do with the matter, though there may well be something wave-like,- neural pulses might be frequency modulated, for example,- and likely highly stochastic/indetermininistic about brain functioning, though the latter applies in some measure to biological causality in general: hence the confusion. And ill-formulated impasses leading to speculations about “panpsychism” is the height of folly: better to dissolve such “problems” than to pretend to “solve” them, and formulate the sorts of questions that can guide one in where to look for actual answers. I also don’t have much sympathy for artificial formalist-functionalist computational models of “mind”, which are philosophically tendentious and abstract from actual situated embodiment and thus actual causal bases. Besides which analogies to digital computers involve a scarcely disguised dualism, whereas, for good evolutionary biological reason, brains likely involve primarily analog processing. And there’s no willingness to entertain the possibility that “mind”, as well as being contingent, might be sheerly superfluous or even aberrant, since the approach through logical analysis allies with a latent instrumentalist account of rationality. (There is no evolutionary reason, for example, for human brains’ ability to do higher mathematics). And, of course, “mind” is not an isolated topic, to be “solved” progressively by specialists, but, philosophically speaking, always involves quasi-systematic implications with other issues, such as agency, knowledge, ethics, etc. There’s no monopoly on the matter, and always there’s a question as to what motivates a particular theoretic program or project and what “need” it evokes or seeks to fill.

Hey, if you think AM solves the mind-body problem, and by extension the problem of free will – well, good for you. It simply doesn’t cut it for me and I am certainly not alone in that. As for me missing parallels to Levinas – maybe so, but since I haven’t read a word of Levinas, that’s hardly a fair allegation.

And yes, armchair philosophy alone won’t lead us to an answer, which doesn’t mean that it’s worthless, but rather that we need an integrated approach that tackles the problem from different angles, which in my book would also include, gasp, empirical psychology and linguistics as well as neuroscience.

Unless I’m misunderstanding, I don’t see how “the wave function evolves deterministically” is relevant. In any model with probability, the underlying probability law evolves deterministically.

I’m not sure what you mean by “. . . the underlying probability law evolves deterministically.” But let me give you one of those philosphy scenarios to show you what I mean.

Let’s say that you roll a fair six-sided die so that each possible outcome has a one in six chance of appearing. Now, what we’ll do is take the person rolling the die and duplicate both them and their surrounding environment exactly, all the way down to the sub-sub-sub-atomic level with the exception of the die, so that in the end you have six identical people looking at six different distinct faces. Now, we know as the experimenter that the die will always come up “with every number”, and that’s completely deterministic. But each individual will look at the die and say that they had exactly a one-in-six chance of seeing what they saw.

And this is what the majority thought seems to be these days amongst physicists, if you can see the analogy. Whenever the subject rolls the die, the “universe splits” six different ways every time. But each individual is unable to communicate with the “other universes”, so they see themselves as only having one chance in six of seeing that particular outcome. The “Many Worlds” theory has a horribly bad name btw, and one which probably helped to keep it from being acknowledged for so long. The much more accurate terminology is that the wave function evolves deterministically so that there are six pieces of it that are roughly the same except for the number appearing on the die. We can’t see those other parts of the wave function though because of a phenomenon called “decoherence”. This isn’t anything mysterious; it merely means that, for example, while you may see distinct waves from a dropped pebble in a pond or three or five, you can’t see the waves when you chuck in a handful of gravel. That is, the waves are still there in accordance with physical law. You just can’t see them because they’re all mixed up and what you perceive is a chaotic surface. This is important enough that it deserves a link so I’ll give one:

The cumulative effect of the interactions is to make the photons look as if they were classical particles, taking one definite path or the other. They’re always quantum objects, though, and they always interfere. Decoherence just keeps you from seeing the pattern.

This is why I say that the standard Many-Worlds language about “separate universes” is pernicious and misleading. What’s going on here is not really a photon splitting into two photons in “separate universes,” one taking each path, it’s a photon wavefunction that is in a superposition state with random phases between the two pieces.

Good stuff that should be included in every high school student’s education.

Even if every individual micro-sized event was deterministic, if it could be proved that the fastest kind of Turing Machine (indeterministic, multiprocessing, multidimensional tape, whatever) would require resources equivalent to all of spacetime and ten times as long as the universe has existed in order to predict a single event accurately, would the universe then be deterministic? I think it would. The key seems to be the introduction of some inexplicable cause.

Hmmm . . . speaking from a physics background, I don’t think this sort of question makes sense. If you’re using all the matter in the universe, what sort of stuff will be involved in the event you’re predicting?

This sort of experimenting appears to draw a distinction between two different sorts of determinism. On the one hand, you have that given the rules of the game and the initial setup you can predict all future moves and all future states. This seems to be what is commonly meant in the physical sense. On the other hand, you have the more metaphysical concept of reproducibility. In that case, you simply say that if the game is restarted from the initial setup, events will play out in exactly the same way as before. Iow, while you may not know the rules of the game, you do know that in the piece of it that you see that moves will always play out the same way regardless of how many times you do them over. So you have the similar but not the same notions of predictability and inevitability. One implies the other, but not vice versa. If pressed, I would have to say that physicists would tend to believe in the latter, but not the former, for example, Einstein’s block universe. Note btw the fact that predictability can be rather more easily proved in some sense than inevitability; short of having a Godlike view of the universe(if not Godlike comprehension), you can’t really be sure that what you see play out many times in a row is really inevitable vs very likely given what you can observe.

This works in a mathematical context as well; it’s easy to assign various sequences a “complexity number” so that those with small numbers are said to be “nonrandom” while those with numbers comparable to the size of the sequence itself are “random”. But there is no way to tell whether these sequences were actually randomly generated from, say, a series of coin flips or the result of some deterministic algorithm, say scanning a series of digits in the decimal expansion of pi.

Yeah, a lot of the time fatalists work out their frustrations trying to get other people to see they ought to become more fatalistic.