Free Will: A Thought Experiment

I just thought of an interesting thought experiment that we might explore in our discussion of free will vs determanism.

Let us say there exists a machine that can completely replicate, bit of matter, by bit of matter any organism that is given to it. Simply by scouring the world around it for a bit of matter that resembles that bit of matter in everyway (eg, it finds a electron with such and such propertys in the organism, if goes out to find one with just the same properties and uses it to make the new replica organism). Somone may say that this is not “physically” possible to which i would disagree but i dont think that anyone could disagree with the fact that this machine is logically possible to create.

So now we take a sperm, we ram it into an egg so that we get an embryo that has all the potential to grow up and become a human being and we toss it into our machine so that we have embryos that are exacally the same in every way… Kinda like an uber cloning machine, except were going beyond mere genetics.

Next we invent a machine that does the exact job that the womb does and put one of our embryos in one, and put anouther one in anouther in EXACALLY the same way. Their orientation is the same, their elevation is the same, its all the same. Next we place these two machines in two TOTALLY identical rooms. Identical in EVERYWAY. These two rooms are also TOTALLY insulated from the outside world. Imagine them as two rooms placed in the farthest reaches of our universe and then a couple billion light years further just to make sure that there is nothing in our universe that could effect them in any way. Again, while this may not be physically possible to do, it surely is logically possible. These two rooms also have machinery in place that will be able to sence the needs of the children and provide for them in the most optimal way possible.

What do ya think would happen? 1 minute later, 1 day later, 1 month later, 1 year later?

If you ask me what would happen is that the two kids be born on the same day, would fall out of the machine exacally the same way, wiggle in exacally the same way, and crawl off in the same direction at the same time when the time came. They would cry at the same time, they would get hungry at the same time, and the machinery would end up responding at the same time to the same needs until they eventually died at the same time from the same reasons and their bodies would decary exacally the same way and turn into dust at the same time. At any point an observer would look in on the room i bet they would be mirrored in everyway.

Given the circumstances what reason could there possibly be for it to turn out any different? What reason could there ever be for one child to do one thing that the other did not. Lets even pretend for a second that free will does exist and that these children can make their own independant decisions. Why would one ever choose to do one thing that anouther did not also choose? What influence could there have been that would make one choose one thing over anouther?

*** in hindsight i realzie that i was presupposing determanism here ***

Okay - you’ve got rid of outside influence, but you’ve still got the internal varibles of the body and those of the mind… Plus of course - they’d both go completely loopy from isolation-syndrome, and start painting the walls with their own faeces… Sorry Diet - but you need to have a bit more of a think about this one.

about the internal variables… that is what im saying, in these two rooms that these variables will be exacally the same. i dont think there would be a single bit of difference between children in the rooms, down to the very tinyest bit of matter in their body and mind. even if for kicks we say that the mind was a seperate entity from the body in which case it would need to be somehow generated at some point from the embryo (which im sure we can agree does NOT have a mind) it would be generated in exacally the same way and the two minds would also thus be identical.

the isolation-syndrome is besides the point as these machines can satisfy any need that the childen need even if that means constructing a mother-like robot that comes in and cares for the child in every psychological way that they need.

alright, you’ve got precise cloning right.
Yes you’re right they’d develop precisely the same as long as all variables are precisely the same .

your reasoning that things which are not physically possible are still “logical” is fallacious. they can be imagined, yes, and logic can be applied to them, yes, but that does not make them logical, because they were dreamed up. so their value is entirely determined by the value of the “dreaming up”. in our case, i dare say that value is nil.

in other words, whatever happens to things that are a few billion miles out of the unvierse, just to be sure, is irrelevant in this universe.

:unamused:
uh!

you jump the gun a little.
The dream is perfectly logical, though in our universe or indeed outside our universe would not be possible.

so a petrol tank exploding outside a building presumably is going to have absolutely no affect on the poeple inside???
The reason why his situation wouldn’t work in reality is that everything at some level has an effect on everything else. But that was part of his idea, read closer.

i didnt nessicarily mean OUTSIDE our uiniverse… i just mean beyond the point that anything in our current universe would have an effect on it which could be easily found by taking the length of time the universe has existed in years for simplicity sake, then multiply it by the speed of light. My rooms exists right outside that point. Thatway, since nothing can propagate faster then the speed of light my rooms would be essentially isolated from the rest of the universe.

dude. read your own writing.

means PRECISELY that it won’t have ANY effect on ANYTHING within our universe. if it can’t be acted on, it can’t act. and its necessarily.

yes, inasmuch as the tank is as far from the building for there to be no interaction possible

in other words, if you are far enough to make interaction impossible, you are far enough to make interaction impossible. how hard can it be ?

im not saying that it CANT have any effect on anything within our universe. Im saying that it doesnt YET. Its quite possible that it could if say, my rooms was located right on the boundry or right before this boundry defined by the distance that something at the speed of light would be at if it had left from the center of the universe at the very beginning of the universe. My rooms just happen to be a bit beyond that point. So that the rest of the universe will EVENTUALLY have an effect on the rooms, but not until my experiment has finished.

Or lets say we place a tennis ball at a location 1m from that little point at the beginning of the universe that expanded into everything we know. Until 1/299,792,458 of a second has passed, that universe and that ball will have NO INTERACTION WHAT SO EVER. What im just talking about is looking at this from a much larger scale.

If something is imagined, and logic can be applied to it (I’m not sure this is a sound way to phrase it), then it’s logical. The problem is that it may not be applicable to the real world/our universe. So the problem would be that the thought experiment is not relevant to anything in the real world/our universe, so why bother trying to solve it? While we’re trying to devine whether human beings (real human beings, in the real world) have free will or not, any solution reached through this thought experiment would be irrelevant and inapplicable to the real human beings anyway. So this thought experiment wouldn’t really be about any real human beings, but rather about (perhaps) alien human beings.

However, I don’t see this as a problem for DietCoke’s thought experiment.

I don’t know what “value” you’re referring to. Do you mean the value of truth? Whether or not the imagined scenario is true? Well, of course it’s not true, in the strictest sense of the term (since it’s never happened). But can it be true? You seem to be saying that it cannot be true because of either of two reasons:
(1) the account of the imagined scenario is too fictional. It could never happen, it’s too “out there”. So it could never apply to the real world, to real human beings. Thus the truth value is zero, or nil.
(2) the fact that the imagined scenario is an imaginational account voids any possibility for it to be true. An imagination simply cannot be applied or relevant to the real world. Thus the truth value is zero, or nil.

I think anyone would agree that the second reason is for the most part absurd, outside of some crazy counterpart theorist or whatnot. In which case we might as well postulate about counterpart human beings. But otherwise I couldn’t even imagine how I would feel drinking orange juice right now. And as for the first reason, I don’t think DietCoke’s thought experiment is too fictional to postulate.

Diet, you make it uneccisarily difficult. Your thought experiment is bassicly the theoretical suggestion of determinism. Determinism says that if we knew all the variables in the universe that effect the future, we could know the future. All you are saying is that if we could also control all those variables, we could design the future. Neither knowing all or controling all is possible I think, but theoreticly, I would agree, seeing as how im a determinist.

But the only variables that are being controlled are:
(1) the biological makeup of the two embryos (the two embryos are identical), and
(2) how they are raised. They are both raised identically, in a certain manner of speaking, but the machines only provide care to the children in response to their needs.

So the machine will only feed a child if the child is hungry. And both children will be fed the same food. Because the two children have identical biological makeup, chances are that they’ll get hungry at the same time, and the machines will feed both children the same food at the same time. But if one child rolls to his right, then the machine will catch the child as the child is falling off the right side of the cradle. While if the other child rolls to his left, then the machine will catch the child as the child is falling off the left side of the cradle. The question is, will there ever be the case that one child rolls to the right and the other rolls to the left at the same time? If they do, then they (supposedly) have free will. If they live their entire lives behaving exactly identically to each other, then they (supposedly) succumb to determinism.

Can a person’s actions be entirely determined simply by knowing their biology and the physical events that they are to be subjected to?

zenofeller

what about the naucious gasses they are going to breathe.

Further more an exploding petrol tank releases heat that is dispersed throughout the atmosphere with the result that the weather is affected, which in turn affects the lives of the people in the building.

Yes, I also would agree with this position. The thread seems to be drifting into speculation of where this all takes place, but this is not relevant. The thought experiment is not attempting to prove anything, it is only trying to clarify what determinism means. And, personally, I think it does this very well.

I initially found determinism to be very uncomfortable; but I’m now much happier with it. My view is that in complex systems (such as biological systems), a very small difference can be magnified to have a very large effect. This is the same as the “butterfly effect” often referred to by chaos theorists.

So this means that even extremely similar histories will not give rise to identical behaviour; they would have to be exactly the same. And we can even go to the level of quantum physics (if we insist :slight_smile: ) to show that the initial conditions can never be identical. So in the thought experiment, the electron of one atom being in a different excitation state can lead to magnified effects which eventually lead to one child rolling to the left, while the other rolls to the right. And, of course, they diverge from there into two different individuals. :slight_smile:

If the two children did something different I would assume one thing. There must be a cause. Therefore I would imagine I did something wrong with the two habitats which made them different in some way. This would not disprove causality to me. In fact I believe the argument for such things is like arguing that an apple is an apple and an orange is an orange. The real question is, what would happen if free-will was openly disproven? What would the implications, what would the effects be, and in what ways is it necessary for people to assume that they have free-will and that others have free-will? I can already think of some good and some bad and I can tell you how, strangely enough as it may sound, the absolute law of no free will actually means free-will. It’s very different from what most of you may imagine it to be. It gets so much crazier from here.

dsalvato, I think eliminating the concept of free will would change nothing in society. I do not see how it would change anything, please give me some examples of situations that may be effected, I would love to hear it.

The most common one I hear is that we wont be able to hold people responsible for their actions, but its balony. It implies an objective standard for right and wrong, but most of us have already out grown that one I think. But in a cause-effect world, consequence is enough to throw people into jail… We can predict the consequences of doing it. First of all, gets them off the streets, less crime, we like less crime. Second of all, its psychological. Its a message: “break the law, we will hurt you” I think you would agree this is incentive NOT to break the law… So the reasons for jail are still there. An objective moral system is not required to justify the legal system. Reason is the best justification…

remember minority report?

it is all destiny…

you will be arrested now because you are predetermined to break the law in the future…

free will indeed…

-Imp

No imp, ive already said that we can never fully determine the future, and we aren’t even close to being able to effectivly predict human action. And even if we did advance our knowledge such that we could detect the early thought process involved in commiting a crime than instead of punishing that person, we could tell them we have an accurate prediction of them commiting a crime in the future, and this knowledge may change their mind. Simple as that. And we should keep an eye on their thought process from then on, knowing that they were in the early stages of destructive thoughts… This would be a great crime stopper… Imagine considering pick pocketing that old lady over there and all of a sudden a cop paracutes in right next to you and says: “We predict you will steal that old lady’s wallet, please dont…”

we predict that the determined future can be changed by our free actions thus leaving the future undeterminable

classic contradictions…

-Imp

Impenitent,

If you reallly understood determinism you would know that the “contradictions” you point out are not contradictions at all. You can’t compare higher level predictions with causality at a fundamental level. Each prediction is based on limited data and can therefore never be 100% accurate. Also, you seem to confuse determinism with fatalism—so it’s no wonder you think it illogical.

Do yourself a favour and read up a bit on the subject.