what is probability - inspired by free will

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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the basic things statistics teaches is that the probability of an event is the result of a division: number of posibile outcomes divided by number of favourable outcomes. example: when rolling a dice, the probability of getting a number greater or equal with 3 is 0.5: there are 6 posibile outcomes, and only three of them are favourable.

more, it teaches us the law of great numbers: repeating the exact same experiment, the frequencies tend to be equal with the probabilities. this raises me a problem: what the law says is that when i flip a coin I cannot know on what face it lands, but the probability to land on a face is 0.5 for each one. that makes sense. then it tells that if i repeat the experiment for many (as in milions, bilions) times, the frequencies (the number of times each face showed divided by the number of repeats) tend to be equal with the probability.

the first problem i see is that i cannot repeat the same experience. each time one of the many variables involved in flipping a coin will be different: the force i apply to the coin, the exact position of the coin on my finger, the wind, etc will vary slightly. should I build such a device that all the variables (or a suficiently large part of them) are controlled and the same for all the repeats, then phisycs tells me that i should always get the same face. the same goes with dice and even far more complex phenomana such as extracting the numbers at the lottery.

i do believe that we live in a deterministic universe, where an event has a cause and an effect (lets just assume that there was an initial event with no cause). from this point of view i find that statistic is just a device we use to guess the events that have far too complex causes to take all of them into account. so correct me if im wrong.

and why this was inspired by free will… ltes say that statistics is like free will. if we live in this deterministic world, than - in theory - we can perdict the future with maximum precision, provided that we have ALL the information. since decisions are some chemichal reactions in our brain, I don’t see whay we cannot predict a decision that one takes, provided that we have all the information.

so free will is a mechanism that we use to cope with the imposbility to know all the relevant factors.

or, as someone said, this is a problem that we should not spend time debating, since reagrdless of the conclusion, we cannot verify it…

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coin tossing is psuedo-random…enough factors interfere with precise control that the effect is somthing very close to a random distribution, 50-50 in this case. The fact that youc an’t even come close to duplicating the initial conditions each time is what causes the result to appear random.

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and what about thoughts and decisions? why shouldn’t the case be somewhat similar?

do we actually call free will a process that is far too complex to have the deterministic theory applied to it? because I find that free will contradicts in an irreconcilable way the cause-effect theory.

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As I was told during my first year course at bristol, would we actually be any freer in an inteterministic universe? I.e. if truly random events do happen (e.g. nuclear decay), and one of these truly random events was at the bottom of each ‘decision’ we made… would it really be us deciding it, when our ‘decision’ would effectively be entirely random?

What Hume (I think, or was it me in my 1st year exam, or was it both of us? not sure. anyway.) concludes is that the notion of determinism vs. indeterminism is actually irrelevant to discussions of free will. What we need is a different model to base our analyses on, some have suggested analysis in terms of desires (i.e. stuff along the lines of “if there’s nothing external preventing us from doing what we desire to do, then we have free will”, or “if what we want is the same as what we want to want” etc.)

I think this is probably true. Free will has less to do with determinism and more to do with whether or not we make our own decisions - whether or not this is mechanical or influenced (however slightly) by a random event.