I was jus wondering what you guys thought. i have been battling this one away in my head for quite some time now. is chance real or is it all goverened by a higher power or is it possible to determine the outcome of anything? do we have the capacity to understand chance and randomness even if it is real? i’m all a bit muddled with this one so any help would be great, cheers guys.
No. Everything(observable) has a cause.
If what you are really asking(which is what it seems like to me) is whether we have free will or if everything is pre-determined, I would lean toward the latter. But only on a scale of causality, not of a mastermind.
Clearly not true. I have free will to choose my actions and my judgements. I am also free to refrain from acting and to refrain from judgement. The only way your position could possibly be true, is if there is some limiting factor upon the range of my choices. Still even if that were true (which I doubt anyone could prove) I would still have nearly an unlimited range of variables within my limited range of choices, anyone of which would affect the outcome of my choices.
If there is no chance then how do Casino’s make all that money?
i get what your talking about, determinism and all that but it’s not really what i mean. when you roll a dice you don’t know what to expect, or flip a coin and all the other kind of unknowns. are these factors pre-determined and if so who by, or would you say that there is chance to a point, so as long as the end result is the desired one then the path does not matter. i’ve just always thought that chance is the biggest unknown, and if we could control it via some kind of all knowing machine or what not we would surely be able to do anything
In the case of flipping a coin or rolling dice, the outcomes can be calculated. Sure, it would be extremely difficult, and it depends on many variables but it can be done. If you take into account the force exherted on the coin or dice, the speed of its spin, the distance it will fall before it stops, etc. it can be calculated. Of course each one of those factors changes slightly each time, so this is what is interpretted as chance.
There’s more to it of course, this is just a simple explanation…
Quantum events appear not to, so I’d say we’re not in a position to make a claim like this.
Not necessarily. It certainly seems to us as if we have free will, but that doesn’t mean we do.
Really? And are your choices not based on past experience? Likes, dislikes?
Genetic predisposition?
Do you have control over these factors?
I would say no.
No, you do not have control over these factors. I am 26 years old and I feel that I am ready to get married. I start dating several people and finally, I meet someone whom I really like…
All the events that had happened in my life, prior to me making a choice of whom to marry , will affect my decision making in this particular situation. Likes, dislikes e.t.c
But I will also make a choice/decision eventually, under no pressure. What am I trying to say? That determinism (all the events that occurred in my life prior to my decision making) and Freewill (my decision making) are in fact compatible. Freedom and Determinism are dependent on each other.
Of course. But that decision will still be entirely based on several factors, which in and of themselves will be formed by events/experiences/genetic predisposition.
The more thought I put into the concept of free will, the more I am convinced it is an illusion…
You probably have a wide repertoire of words in your arsenal. You probably also don’t just go around saying words randomly. Exceptionally small decisions/choices are involved when you are expressing yourself (knowing what to say, how to say it, when to say it e.t.c)… Now, we both maintain roughly the same idea of determinism but I’m perplexed that u think freewill is just but an “llusionâ€. I would like to know how you define freewill.
Consider this example by Inwagen:
I would ask you to try a simple experiment. Consider some important choice that confronts you. You must, perhaps, decide whether to marry a certain person, or whether to undergo a dangerous but promising course of medical treatment, or whether to report to a superior a colleague you suspect of embezzling money. (Tailor the example to your own life.) Consider the two courses of action that confront you; since I don’t know what you have chosen, I’ll call them simply A and B. Do you really not believe that you are able to do A and able to do B? If you do not, then how can it be that you are trying to decide which of them to do? It seems clear to me that when I am trying to decide which of two things to do, I commit myself, by the very act of attempting to decide between the two, to the thesis that I am able to do each of them. If I am trying to decide whether to report my colleague, then, by the very act of trying to reach a decision about this matter, I commit myself both to the thesis that I am able to report him and to the thesis that I am able to refrain from reporting him: although I obviously cannot do both these things, I can (I believe) do either. In sum: whether we are free or not, we believe that we are—and I think we believe, too, that we know this. We believe that we know this even if, like Holbach, we also believe that we are not free, and, therefore, that we do not know that we are free.
If you would have asked me a month ago, I would have given a completely different answer. But at this point, I am unsure such a thing exists.
On the surface, freewill is the ability to choose. But are not our choices predetermained by our preferences?
Yes, I agree. But you only WILL do one thing, in an either/or situation. Is what you will do really a product of that moment, when you think you are making the choice? Or is that action a result of past experiences/preferences/etc that lead you to believe one choice is superior?
I am not so sure anymore.
i’m bringing it back to the original thing here but i know we can use measuring devices and all the rest to determine the flip of a coin but the devices would have to work with infinite percision which is inconcievable especially due to the fact that the initial conditions are under constant change so i would say that it is impossible to do exact measurments which would lead to uncertainty and in the end its just chance whether we are right or wrong because the results would be unreliable. the same applies to chance discoveries like penecilin and things like that. how is it possible to have something so random it cannot be concieved by man…yet
True, in real practice, it is impossible to determine things like that. It is another one of those things that is only theoretically possible.
Should a distinction be made between chance and choice?
Chance is doubtless influenced by what we have become, but it is more dependent on what is offered to us when we make the choice.
An example:
I choose to study engineering, to take one trivial instance, but I can’t do that at Stanford or some university like that immediately. I can, however, walk up to the local Bangalore university close to which I live and where I am more probable to find a seat and translate my choice of studying engineering into action. So to effect my choices of small chance, larger amounts of effort are required.
What is will lead to what will be. And it is not at all natural hierarchial levels that we can determine events through our position, choice and our intervention. This is because we ourselves are products of many processes of chance. And what we think is not platonically decisive, but is based on many requirements which will express them,selves at different levels in either our decision or our disposition.
Determinism is only possible on higher levels of organization like human systems, in an office where we can make decisions about work, but maybe not on the molecular scale, like channeling an electron through a particular path in space through a magnetic field. We may not exactly know where the electron is because of the uncertainty in processes of energy transfer and in position/momentum. We can measure how uncertain it can be but we can never be certain about its position - it becomes a range of values and hence a probability from there on.
There is another small detail - chaos. All our determinism is broken down at different levels by chaos. Chaos has a pattern, but is unavoidable in all systems. As the levels of energy and information interaction in a system increase, the entropy of different levels will consequently change and we will necessarily have more chaos. Information theory is a very interesting subject related to this study.
There was a discussion about freedom of choice as well - maybe this is best expressed as determinism on large scales and when deciding down gradients. When I am affluent, I can choose to be a philanthropist and do it well, actually, get right into it. When I don’t have too much but for my own good, I can still choose to become a philanthropist, but have to go through several stages of wealth accumulation to be on par with that other guy who’s doing fine with the cash he has, and when into philanthropy. So thats just it - decisions with better chance are usually down-gradient decisions and decisions which have lesser chance of materializing have to go through several stages before they are manifested. If I want a few thousand molecules of a special aphrodisiac to land on my greatest secret love so that she may fall for me, then I may have to exercise faculties which will cost me much more than to simply find other ways of expressing my intentions to her. So thats deciding what to do about an issue. And there’s what you need to do to exercising your decision. Most humans find other more profitable and “pragmatic” (when they give up?) methods of courtship. So its a range of things actually.
Any thoughts?
cheers beers, this is helping me a lot. i have always loved chance, chaos and all its beautiful siblings and embraced them when they happen upon my doorstep. but when i thought that they might not be real it all went to pot. but this debate has affirmed my original idea that they are real and unpredictable, inpractise at least which is all i need because we dont live in a theoretical wolrd.
There is this little book by Scott Adams (yeah, of Dilbert fame) entitled, God’s Debris. In this book he suggests that probability is the will of God. Basically the idea that God creates and organizes the universe through the force of probability. I thought it was a fun little idea, and a well written book. Worth a read. Its short, so its a good way to spend a hour.
chance is certainly real. Chance as defined by me, is the force in which governs happenings to yeild an outcome in which could not be predetermined. For it to exist there can be no predetermination. So, if there actually was some type of being, higher power, or whatever you wanna call it that was governing, or supposedly knew what was going to occur in life; chance could not exist. it saddens me to know that most people are taught that there is a higher power that knows all blah blah blah, its BOVINE FECES!
Umm, yes actually. I do not want to interpret you incorrectly but what I feel you are saying here is that what u have described as decision making is freedom of choice. How can this be true? Dr. Santanical made a crucial point:
Every decision we make in our minds, when we think it out and arrive to a conclusion, is based on previous experiences and beliefs. These experiences that we have encountered have been brought about by the concept of chance. Regardless if the encounter or experience was planned before it happened, it is still the outcome of many variables which themselves have been a result of chance. Needless to say every future is determinded by chance because the variables could and may very well be innumerable. So if you decide to spray your secret love with thousands of molecules, it was because you(which includes your conscious and unconscious thoughts) felt that because of your past dealings with outcome and chance( as related to above), this would yield a better outcome over the other choices.This can in no way be considered a free choice. In understanding this concept is there any choice or decision made that is not so determined with chance? I think not… please critique my thoughts.
Hi illativemindindeed,
Lots of points to discuss. First things first - yes I should have made a distinction between decision making and freedom of choice. Agreed on that.
Actually what I meant in the example I gave about the aphrodisiac molecules is that from a purely deterministic point of view, I have much less control over a group of molecules headed her way as compared to what I have to say to her and how I express my intentions. So I meant that example from a purely physical perspective. That I choose either of those methods, like you said, comes down to your explanation. I make the choice of what method I use based on what I have understood about these methods. Given that they are so disparate in this circumstance, I can choose to ration well and practically, but given closer choices (which may again depend on what I have understood before), I may not be able to, and there it comes down to chance I think.
But again I will say that these are deterministic except for the fact that there are perhaps too many variables or there are incomplete solutions (where the number of relationships between the different variables is lesser than the number of variables themselves, so we have to go in with an assumption on atleast one variable)
You can perhaps see how the determinism is present, but is limited to some levels, or rather present in diminished quantities in the other levels of organization.
I had another thought - dunno if this belongs here - I remember when I read about Psychohistory which Isaac Asimov wrote about in many of his novels - that is based on using statistical principles to predict crowd behaviours and estimate probabilities of events happening. I guess this is based on studies of probabilistic tendencies in human behaviour too. However there are pivot points in the script of events which causes them to go one way or another towards a desirable target because of a few orchestrated events. There are examples of this type in his novels as well. I wonder if that could allude to a feasible model of chance in active systems like human systems. Kind of reminds me of Hidden Markov Models in predictable systems but that is another discussion altogether.
Ahhhhh, well stated. And I agree with you, whichever method you choose could be deterministic, but i dont percieve how the level of disparity among the methods can increase chance. I dont know if you realize it, and im not attacking you, but your statements seem somewhat contradictory. You succumb to the possibility that from a deterministic outlook that the level of determination can in some cases be large and in others be very small. This yields, though you did not specify, that in each method there is some deterministic possibility. Would not this suggest that there is no chance involved? You mentioned Asimov and the use of psychohistory to determine specific outcomes. If this was related to human behavior and these “pivot points” were to bring about an opposite or rather unexpected outcome, then I personally feel that the calculations were incorrect. This relates back to the conclusion that though outcomes could be deterministic, they would be nearly impossible to determine. I would assume Asimov’s calculations were incorrect in those particular events, but then again its only an assumption.