Determinism

Pretty remarkable how many people are destined to buy me a beer. Buy now and cheat fate!

This reminds me of that choose your own adventure that is, in a convoluted way, impossible to terminate, which furthermore had as its (impossible) win condition actual entrance into Heaven (a.k.a. Utopia).

Also the Time Warp something or other detective-esque knockoff choose your own adventures which sent you in loops until you made the “right” choice to exit each loop, which is really an abominable practice, although it thereby taught 10-year-olds geeky enough to read the things through the value of Turing machines.

If you agree with these comparisons, go to comment 4. If you disagree, go to comment 4

If you are Roger Penrose, let the book’s quantum waveform collapse to page 72.

The problem with hard determinism is that it isn’t compatible with reliable thought. If you ‘study’ the science of the brain and ‘determine’ that all thoughts are purely the result of a particular brain’s inputs, you have undercut your own ability to reliably ‘study’ and ‘determine’ anything.

Which isn’t really to say that hard determinism is wrong, but that it is axiomatic, not provable.

All true, but what the hell is ‘comforting’ about it?

I thought hard determinism was the view that determinism is true AND is incompatible with free will and/or moral responsibility? That’s what the ‘hard’ is for.

And I suppose the next move in the dialectic is to say that just because something is a real ‘choice’ doesn’t mean that the chooser had the sort of control over the choice required for her to be genuinely morally responisible for it (‘genuine’ here to mark the distinction between actually being responsible and merely being held responsible).

page 68

You meet Nietzsche, who explains the concept of eternal return.

Turn to page 68.

page 50

You meet Sartre, who explains the idea of existential bad faith.

You must now turn to page 51.

The old man is right, of course. There’s only one reality, and no apparent reason to believe that another one is possible.

The cartoon is great, but it suggests–as do some of the comments–a misleading way to think about determinism. Determinism is not committed to the truth of claims of the form “no matter what, x happens.” For example, this morning I had a cup of coffee. If determinism is true, then given the state of the world prior to my drinking the coffee, drinking coffee was the only possibility. Included in this prior state was the fact that I desired a cup of coffee. Now, it simply does not follow from determinism that, even if I hadn’t desired coffee, I would have had the coffee. Whether I had coffee this morning depended on my desiring it. No desire, no drinking coffee.

To take another example, consider the “clockwork” universe envisioned by Newtonian physics. Deterministic through and through. But now think about this statement:

The Earth would have had the orbit it did, even if Jupiter had not existed

According to Newtonian physics, this is patently false!

This could almost be an instantiation of what I had considered writing, the “choose your own dissertation”. “If X follows, turn to p. 92, if ~X, turn to page 68.”

@22

Hi Henri,

I wasn’t suggesting that it was possible that Jupiter not exist. Rather, I was arguing that the “no matter what” formulation is misleading.

Think of it in terms of counterfactuals. I say that (1) is true and (2) is false:

(1) If I had not desired coffee this morning, then I would not have had coffee

(2) If I had not desired coffee this morning, then I would have had coffee

By the way, I sure hope determinism does not entail that we cannot evaluate the truth of counterfactuals!

One quick question: what does it mean to say that a slice of time-space *always* existed? Does it make sense to apply temporal attributes to time-space slices?

Martin’s right – the cartoon collapses determinism and fatalism. But then it really couldn’t have been otherwise.

In my experience, most dudes in rags who tell you to turn to a page in a book are talking about the Bible.

You could choose at random and find yourself in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

“It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just something that is said.”

had to be said – Henri. At least in this here slice. Unless a quantum fluctuation has quirked us apart in what could be different different slices (conceivably at least) in which case I hope our various ‘I’-s will be recomposed by fortuitous opening of a set of worm holes.

But, nevermind, one of these days a ‘thought reading machine’ will be perfected by the hard working neuroscientists. At that point in time we don’t need to get up early in the morning anymore: we merely have to think of getting up early in the morning.

blimey, i wootn’t know wot to do.

if only he’d offer me a choice between one box or two!

This sort of discussion about free will sounds very medieval[1]. And shouldn’t some sort of distinction be made between the qualia experienced by people and the external influences that give rise to them? One can argue ad infinitum about whether there is “really” such a thing as color; but the fact that proximate cause of color is the result of the human eye being exposed to electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths between 3800 and 7600 nanometers seems to be a pretty hard and fast observation.

[1]I’m rather rusty on this stuff and didn’t know it very well to begin with, but doesn’t the Western formulation of the idea of free will intimately connected with Christian theology?

You turn to page 72

A young man passes by and corrects the old man’s previous judgement, by noting that individual neurons behave nondeterministically, it is only in the limit of macroscopic existence in which we have the appearance of determinism. Thus even though our actions are not mechanical and predetermined, it is only through repetition of these chance events that the resistance of certain neural pathways are “streamlined” and we gain the appearance of free will.

Roll a die and turn to page 89+x_1 where x_1 is the number rolled. If you have been to this page n times before then turn to page 89+(x_1+x_2+x_3+…+x_n)/n, where x_1,…,x_n are the numbers rolled on each of the n times you have visited this page (round the result to the nearest whole number).

you guys just *might* want to look into the pre-christian history of debates about fate, determinism, moral responsibility, and so on.

i don’t want to get in the way of your hating on christianity and all, but when it comes to arguing over determinism and punishment, the christians really came late to the party, and mostly just repeated jokes that everyone had already heard.

any chance you are connected to the internet and know how to use wikipedia or the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy?

The real problem is coming up with a satisfying description of how free will is actually supposed to work, i.e. when presented with two equally appealing or appalling alternative courses of action, how and when exactly is one “chosen” over the other and what is the exact nature of the mental state “making the choice”. Once you go beyond the language of pop psychology, things very quickly become really, really difficult…

I just realized the the fact that windows comes pre-installed on PCs and IE comes preinstalled in windows disproves determinism: Who/What, with any logic whatsoever, would allow this to be predetermined??? (unless of course its to teach us a valuable lesson in patience… and the while(true) loop continues :-) )

When we ahead up a few posts we find a fresh entry on ethics, which would be a completely pointless sort of consideration if we didn’t generally presume a certain amount of freedom of action. How does it work for philosophers? If you sign on to determinism you get to skip ethics?

The rest of us remain stuck in the mire, wondering whether it’s fair to the drivers behind us to let a car get in front of us.

In determinist orthodoxy, 49 should have ended: “Except this one.”

novakant, are you saying that ‘it’s the free will’ functions the same as ‘it’s God’s will’? That would be an interesting comparison. I think it fails though – because ‘free will’ isn’t played as the trump card to stop discussions. The solution lies in something like Davidson’s ‘Anomalous Monism’ – if we know everything about a certain situation that situation allows to be described in a variety of ways, each description giving rise to a variety of ‘best’ choices. If so, free will is grounded – even if we do not know the actual mechanisms underlying actual choices. Whatever is the case – ‘free will’ has nothing to do with the statistical uncertainties proper to physics.

@36
“What you call red, I also call red. But the color you call red is not the same color I call red.”
“You’re favourite color can be pink and mine can be blue, but what we are seeing is the exact same thing”

I don’t really know what side to take as both are possible. The color thing both sugests that we all have the same favourite color and like the same music (that we all like the same things but just call them different things). This could be used to back up both sides of the discussion depending on the context it is placed in.

I’m not trying to be deep or mystical here. I’m only suggesting that free will, like color, is a subjective impression. That doesn’t make it any less real. For that matter it doesn’t make it any less the result of external, objective stimuli, just like color is the result of objective electromagnetic radiation stimulating photochemical reactions within the retina. At this point, I don’t think there’s really a lot more that you can add to the discussion until the underlying neurological mechanisms are better understood.

We’ve known since early last century that ain’t this universe.

QM and buzzwords like “uncertainty” really have no place in a discussion concerning causal determinism and free will. QM isn’t magick. It says nothing about spirituality or human freedom. It in no way rules out a deterministic universe. In fact, it’s probably our best shot at ever having something like a truly deterministic physical theory.

“It [QM] in no way rules out a deterministic universe. “

Publish Treilhard, you’ll be famous.

If a marauding lion killed goats from your flock, of course you would punish him — you’d go out with the other villagers and hunt him. No need to speculate on whether or not the lion has free will.

Publish, Treilhard, you’ll be famous.

Not as famous as you’d think, libertarian. I mean, de Broglie has already collected the Noble Prize, and I can’t imagine becoming much more famous than David Bohm or John Bell for re-publishing arguments that are 60 years old. Do you have any actual knowledge of the relevant science, or do you just see a post titled “determinism” and respond with “Heisenberg said something once about uncertainty”?

Also, novakant, are you completely unaware of the rolled up newspaper treatment for misbehaving pooches?

geo, are you being wilfully obtuse or do you really not grasp the problem at hand?

#64: No, I’m doing my best.

geo: there definitely was a significant pre-christian debate about free will (Stoic determinists vs. Epicurean free-willians, or whatever you call them), though I don’t know how the debate changed in Christian times. I don’t have any particular texts to hand, but I’ll try to come back to this thread with Long & Sedley when I get a chance.

It definitely wasn’t about justifying eternal reward or punishment, since the Epicureans believed in neither. There was a religious aspect on the Stoic side, though; fate was definitely God’s plan, and one of their arguments (though not the best) was, “if there were no fate, how could soothsayers do their job?”

Why would God have to be a mad sadist? Couldn’t He just be trying to deter people from sinning, in much the same way that you want to deter them from committing crime? If you can support earthly punishments without free will why can’t God support posthumous ones? Or do you just think Hell is excessive and God would be within his rights to scare people with something a little less extreme?

…and similarly most apologists for criminal punishment emphasise our capacity to choose whether or not to offend. Geo rejects this, but believes punishments can still be meted out ‘with no less justification’ because this has good consequences.

Why can’t God reason in the same way? Why’s he a sadist if Geo isn’t?

Yawn! How do these determinism arguments get started and why should we take them so seriously? Isn’t the totalized account of causality tout court somewhat suspect? A “complete” account of causality is projected, but by what? By “mind”? Which then needs to be accounted for in terms of its own projection of causality.

There’s no talk of the organization of causes, of disparate sorts, and the structures that constrain causal flows, which give rise to the emergent properties and capacities which solicit explanation. No, there must be one single totalized account!

To begin with, organism are a distinct causal organization that establish themselves by delimiting themselves from their environments, and intervene in distributed environmental causal events on the basis of the requirements of their metabolic organization. (The organism is “open” to its environment precisely to the extent that its is systemically “closed”). The “system” objection to the “Chinese Room Argument” that came up in a thread a while back suffers from the fact that there is no such thing as a “system” per se, only a system-environment relation, which point neither set of philosophers seems to recognize. (There’s also confusion in that the argument conflates semantic understanding with the existence of any sort of mental features per se, as if language were merely a projection of the mental and as if there weren’t non-or-pre-semantic mental capacities to be considered).

Once one gets the organism/environment relation straight, then it’s not hard to account for the emergent evolution of mental properties and capacities in a biological evolutionary context, as facilitating and mediating organism/environment interactions. And it’s not hard to jigger up some plausible accounts of neural causal processes that would result in the sort of openness, indeterminacy or under-determination, and variability that we would phenomenologically associate with mental phenomena. A sufficiently stochastic and multivalent, (i.e. where myriad different pathways lead to the same “result”), set-up would allow for mental properties and capacities to have a physical basis without any unique set of causal events corresponding to and thus determining/reducing the mental phenomena. And insofar as it is the pattern of neuronal events/firings rather than any discrete set of them that amounts to a mental phenomenon, say, a thought, then a pattern of neuronal events can induce a subsequent pattern of such events: hence mental causality, not just mental events causing other mental events, nor a parallelism of mental and physical causal events, but something mental intervening and effecting a difference in something physical. Without any meaningful formula for the reducibility of the mental to the physical. After all, what is real is what has efficacy, and if mental phenomena had not efficacy, made no difference, just why, pray tell, would they have emergently evolved? A neurally embedded primary-perceptual consciousness system would be an evolutionary real only if at least some part of the selective behavioral decisions of the organism were passed through it and that, in turn, made a behavioral difference, with selection advantages, to its interactions with its environment. And, of course, there is the anti-Cartesian presumption here: why would humans have mental features, such as consciousness, if such were not distributed among at least some other animal species, as evolutionary precursors?

But we’re still within the realm of causality here, even if mental causality is allowed, and if the totalization of a deterministic/reductionist account is defused, since it amounts to an epiphenomenalist account of the mental, which explains it away, rather than explaining it, and thus involves a self-denying ordinance and a kind of performative contradiction. We haven’t gotten to “freedom”, human agency. To explain that language/symbolic thinking is required, since only if there is a symbolic duplication of the environment/world can states-of-affairs be entertained in terms of their counter-factual possibilities and behavior selections be made in terms of those possibilities, rather than simply immediately and adaptively responding to environmental events or cycles of events. That’s the rudiment of human agency, “freedom”, as a real phenomenon, what ever its subsequent elaborations. But language/meaning is a non-causal set of relations, which can’t be derived from prior “meaningless” causal antecedents, even as an emergent/conjunctural phenomenon, nor reduced to a prior set of environmental phenonema that it would “reflect” or “represent”. (Causal chain accounts of reference, though of dubious value, presuppose, rather than account for, “meaning”, since only with “meaning” is there any need to account for reference). Communicative interaction between organisms don’t “cause” the respective mental states of the respective organisms, but rather bring about modal shifts in the relationships between said organisms, which can be accepted or rejected or lead on to further such interactions, as the respective mental states respond. The “circuits” of such communicative interactions are entirely irreducible, even notionally, to complicated sets of naturalistic causal events. There’s been a decisive “leap” from natural environmental explanation into socio-cultural forms-of-life, from environmental orientation to orientation toward a world, and “explanation” shifts to the constraining social structures comprised of and generated by action-and communication events. To be sure, conditioned by physical environmental and organic realities, and in no wise underwriting any metaphysical fantasies about unconditional “free will”. But also unamenable to equally metaphysical fantasies of totalized naturalistic determinism.

Nietzsche spoke of the “cause finding superstition”. And much of the project of providing a hyper-naturalistic account of “mind” amounts to such “Enlightened” higher superstition. But then modern human societies have so dominatively surmounted natural realities, to the point of disintegrating them and causing them to virtually disappear,- (with what consequences for such societies themselves?),- reversing the traditional polarity between societies and their subjection to the dominative/mythic “powers” of nature, that such projects operate in massive bad faith, reducing socio-cultural structures and human responsibility for them to “blind” adaption to the prevailing status quo.

That’s interesting John, and largely corresponds to my intuitions on the subject. Do you have any suggestions regarding literature that discusses these topics at greater length?

Henri — that could be because you have an incorrect understanding of what hard determinism means. Determinism is the view that everything in the universe (including human beings) could only have behaved and may only behave in the way that it has done and is pre-determined by the laws of physics to do in the future. This is, or is claimed to be, a scientific fact. Compatibilism is the view that this fact is consistent with human being’s having free will. Hard determinism is the view that it isn’t, and that free will is an illusion.

You haven’t given any argument for hard determinism here, only determinism. But most people who believe in free will are compatibilists, which means they accept that determinism is true will believing that people have free will.

No, I think I get the drift. But let’s say I do have these “metaphysical fantasies of totalized naturalistic determinism” (74). Can these fantasies be refuted?

Compatibilism is the view that this fact is consistent with human being’s having free will. Hard determinism is the view that it isn’t, and that free will is an illusion.

What about people who believe in a deterministic universe, and free will, and that free will is an illusion?

Can these fantasies be refuted?

Don’t ask me. Some people think they have been because of the points about quantum mechanics mentioned above. My point was that many people who believe in free will think it’s possible to do so without doing this.

I know more than you think, Tryhard. Bohm, Bell, et al are not your friends when it comes to determinism. Their theories are necessarily non-deterministic when extended to cover quantum field theory (specifically, particle creation and annihilation).

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.

Novakant @76:

On the neuro-physiological side of things, I’m partial to Gerald Edelman. “A Universe of Consciousness” by Edelman and Tononi is well-written and fairly accessible. (His first attempt at a popularization was terribly written; teaming up a junior partner greatly improved the discipline and quality of the prose, though the first effort remains of interest, if one ignores its flaws).

More generally, I’m operating under the influence of Whitehead’s “natural cosmology”/anti-reductionism realism with the key notion of emergent evolution, which is the opposite of Quine-style reductionist physicalism: I basically don’t think the notion of “nature” is adequately and coherently conceivable without some such account. (Curiously, Quine was beginning his career at Harvard just as Whitehead was finishing up his, so the former must have been exposed to his “refutation”, even before he elaborated his views. For that matter, Davidson was a classics student there at the time, who took a couple of Whitehead’s last courses: “anamolous monism” might be regarded as recuperating something of Whitehead in Quine’s Analytic idiom).

A case for anti-reductionist physicalism is made, in somewhat rambling style, by SFI theoretical biologist Stuart Kaufmann, which I largely agree with, though I utterly lack such a level of scientific competence, and don’t care much for the theme of the venue, in this video:

http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/beyond-belief-enlightenment-2-0/stuart-kauffman

I skipped going on about how language-use, as the “root” of human agency, is always and everywhere, one way or another, directly or indirectly, a relation to the other, and so how my agency/”freedom” is always bound up in that of others, as somewhat OT on this thread and as offensive to the delicate first-person sensibilities of the usual crowd here. But part of the motivation/aim of Levinas’ work is to recuperate the sense of human agency from without its multiple naturalistic dissolutions in modern thought, (most of all Nietzsche’s critique of morality, but also various natural-scientific, social-scientific and linguistic-semiological forms of it), without exactly denying their validity. One of Levinas’ key points is that “freedom” has always, at least implicitly, been “measured” against causality and the mastery thereof, “autonomy”, in Western (post-)metaphysical thinking, which is certainly and unoriginally reprised in Analytic “philosophy of mind”. So the Levinasian “paradox” that one’s responsibility precedes and exceeds one’s “freedom” is an utter offense to “reason”, until one realizes that such “freedom” is couched in terms of the relation to the other, rather than in terms of solipsistic self-mastery. Each and every irreducibly particular human existence, with the irreversible specificity of its fate, is existentially separate from each and every other such human existence. But existential separateness is not the same as the metaphysical ideal of “autonomy”. All real “freedom” is heteronomous, bound up in relation to the other, which is not the same as abject subjection to it. On the other hand, putting the case for human agency in contra-position to causality does bring out what a finite, constitutively limited, and structurally constrained “thing” it is, as a real phenomenon, which accords with existential thinking, at least in its less over-blown forms. But all this gets deep into the weeds of continental post-Heideggerian thinking, which is taboo here.

(P.S. I put “freedom” in scare quotes and prefer the idiom of human agency, because I’m suspicious of the ideological abuses of the notion of “freedom”. Such as, in liberal thinking, the autonomous ego is somehow, implausibly, the terminus ad quem of human history, or, in rightist thinking, the “freedom” of the sovereign is the sine qua non, or in economistic thinking, the “freedom” of markets is anything but a functionalistic account).

I assume “libertarian” is the same guy who hilariously failed in his attempt to convince us he understood climate science a couple of weeks ago. Let’s watch as he hilariously fails to understand quantum mechanics! (Admittedly, I know a lot of people whose work involves quantum mechanics who don’t understand quantum mechanics, so he’s in good company.)

I feel the urge to say something that will come over as petty and unhelpful (no surprise, I guess): @90, see my 52 … “anomalous monism”.

…well, come to think of it, I was probably already conditioned by my grandmother, who lived through the most horrific events of 20th century Europe and somehow acquired this same disposition.

Hell, we’re all conditioned by Adam and Eve.

96- maybe so but John’s pointers included, non-coincidentally, Davidson. And if you put him in a list like the one above it is quite possible you missed the connection to AM, missed Davidson’s connection to Gadamer and missed how Levinas’ essentialness of the ‘Other’ is similar to Donald Davidson’s view on ‘triangulation’ and for that matter, the Habermasian view that our humanity starts with out ability to critically discuss with one another. But that’s just more ‘armchair’ ;-(

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.

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.

JoB @91 &96:

“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.

Henri Vieuxtemps @ 92 &93:

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!

SoV: You’re making my argument (I think). Take any model with probability in it. Postulate a different model where instead of things happening probabilistically that the world splits into multiple worlds, and every possibility happens. Then viola! you have a deterministic model.

“I assume “libertarian” is the same guy who hilariously failed in his attempt to convince us he understood climate science a couple of weeks ago. Let’s watch as he hilariously fails to understand quantum mechanics!”

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.

We’ve gone way, way beyond my knowledge and comprehension here, plus I’m still too lazy to go pick up my Long & Sedley, but I do want to bring back the Epicureans briefly, for what might perhaps be a useful point.

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?