Sabine Hossenfelder on Free-Will and Determinism

You said, “humans are uncertain, reality is not.” The most obvious interpretation of this, is that you are saying reality is certain.

Are you saying what you actually meant is that reality is neither certain nor uncertain, because such descriptions don’t apply to it? If so, I am inclined to agree.

Not applicable.

We agree. :smiley:

Finally, a meeting of minds at ILP! :astonished:

Indeed, certainty and uncertainty are artifacts of minds, not nature, just like morality and immorality.

A useful discussion of this is due to Richard Rorty, whom I’ll be talking about in the thread on morality.

Of course, we still have no definitive way in which to determine if any definition that anyone gives to free will is one that they were actually able to come up with…freely?

Unless perhaps we say only what we were never able to not say. And, in the manner in which some construe hard determinism, there is no inside and outside force…it’s all just the human brain wholly in sync with the laws of matter regarding anything that we think, feel, say or do.

As for example when we dream. In the dream we might think that we choose to act as we do without the imposition of an outside force. But then when we wake up we grasp that this “choice” was nothing more than our brain going about its thing chemically and neurologically.

But then perhaps back to this: You are free to do what you want, but you are not free to want what you want. Your motivations and desires and knowledge and all your other mental states wholly intertwined in the only possible reality.

The part of quantum mechanics that he’s talking about here very much is a statement about reality. The sorts of indeterminite states and superpositions in QM are not merely mathematical tools to make predictions, it can be shown that certain properties are literally indeterminite prior to measurement. I made a thread about Bell’s Theorem, which is one of the fundamental experiments that shows this.

I feel like you’re flipping back and forth between ‘free will isn’t random at all’ and ‘free will cannot exist without some randomness’.

If we’re a slave to physics under determinism, then add a little bit of randomness into the mix, and we’re not suddenly NOT a slave, we’re now a slave to determinism plus a little bit of randomness. I can’t see how the randomness gives us more control.

Since you bring up Bell:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism

I think that he, and I, are challenging the idea that we are slaves to physics under determinism.

As to the superdeterminism just raised, that was also brought up in the Bell’s Theorem thread. It’s a theory that violates statistical independence, with the utterly bizarre result that all our experiments are predetermined to show that QM is indeterministic when in fact it is deterministic. My impression is that very few scientists see much in this, though Sabine Hossenfelder is a big advocate of it. Of course what scientists think has no bearing on reality, but how would you test superdeterminism? Sabine seems to think she has a test, but I don’t have sufficient details to comment on it and even if I did, I’m not a scientist. The point other scientists have raised, though, is how there could be a reliable test for superdeterminism, when superdeterminism says all our tests are, basically, unreliable?

I think that a correct understanding of free will is that it’s anything but random. When people say that they made a decision of their own free will, they aren’t saying that they rolled the dice. They are saying that the decision was the result of their own decision process. They are saying that it wasn’t coerced by anything external to that process, whether it be the laws of physics or somebody holding a gun to their head.

I’m suggesting that free will can’t exist in conditions where decisions are already determined and preordained by the state of the universe and by the laws of physics long before the decisions were made. Even before the one making the decision even existed.

I’m using “some randomness” to try to craft an argument against determinism. I’m questioning the kind of metaphysics in which the state of the universe at some time A plus some set of dynamical laws precisely determine the state of the universe at all subsequent times B, C and D. I’m not convinced that reality works that way.

If the state of the universe at some prior time isn’t mapped one-to-one with any particular state of the universe at some subsequent time, then the spectre of enslavement would seem to have evaporated. The state at the prior time doesn’t determine the state at the subsequent time.

The state of the universe at some prior time seems to me to be consistent with a whole array of possible states at subsequent times. The possibility space occupied by those subsequent states seems to grow as the temporal interval grows longer. It’s like weather forecasts. We can predict the weather in a day with great accuracy. In a week with somewhat less accuracy. A month out it’s starting to resemble throwing darts at a weather map.

Presumably something determined one’s supposedly free decision at the later time. But if that was the actor’s own cognitive process, including his/her understanding of the situation he/she was in, applicable desires, values and so on, then what we normally mean by ‘free-will’ would seem to be preserved.

And with the elimination of deterministic enslavement, the free-will/determinism problem has lost half of its dilemma.

It opens up the possibility that my decision was the result of my own cognitive process and not some set of dynamical laws plus the state of the universe long before my cognitive decision process ever commenced.

.

This is what I have been arguing in the determinism thread, but I’d go farther and say the whole dilemma is evaporated.

deterministic enslavement, I missed that in the quote. That’s a good way to put it. I call it “hard dominoes” determinism and reject that we are just a domino. The point I’ve been arguing in the determinism thread is that the laws of nature are not laws, but descriptions. Descriptions of nature cannot force human behavior or anything else for that matter.

If the state of the universe at some prior time isn’t mapped one-to-one with any particular state of the universe at some subsequent time, then the spectre of enslavement would seem to have evaporated. The state at the prior time doesn’t determine the state at the subsequent time.

In my opinion, this isn’t the case. Adding randomness to the mix does not eliminate a single little bit of enslavement.

If you have a computer program that makes chess moves, generally it will use heuristics to eliminate a bunch of moves, then use algorithms to give ratings to a bunch of other moves.

So scenario 1: it gives ratings to a bunch of moves, it is programmed to choose the highest rated move. It deterministically chooses that one every time it gets put in the same situation.

Scenario 2: same program, but this time instead of choosing the highest rated move every time, it uses a random number generator to choose the highest rated move 60% of the time, second highest move 25% of the time, and the third highest move 15% of the time.

Is there any meaningful sense in which this program is more free in scenario 2? As far as I can see, no. In the first scenario, you say he’s a slave to his programming. The second scenario doesn’t do anything to decrease his enslavement though, because he doesn’t choose the output of the random number generator. In the second scenario, he’s 99% a slave to his programming, and 1% a slave to the random number generator.

The same logic applies when it comes to adding randomness into physics to try to get some freedom for human choice. You don’t add freedom by adding randomness, you just add a new source of slavery. If anything you have LESS freedom when you add randomness in the mix, since you possible have less control in the world with randomness.

This is why I cannot accept any concept of free will that is not compatibilist: randomness cannot add freedom.

Superdeterminism is basically the “solipsism” position in physics: it’s an interesting thought experiment, but you’re supposed to think past it, not get stuck in it.

I admit that’s a bit overly dismissive of me, it’s taken slightly more seriously by that apparently by some physicists, but as I said in my previous discussion about it, if that’s the explanation for bells theorem, it seems to require the universe to have arbitrarily decided to trick us by giving us misleading experimental results. To me it’s the physics equivalent of saying “those are not really ancient dinosaur fossils, God put those there to test our faith.” But instead it’s “bell tests don’t really disprove local hidden variables, the universe just gives us those experimental results to test our faith.”

What’s interesting is that, on the Wiki page for superdetermism, the argument in the paragraph that starts with “Swedish physicist Johann Hansson has proven that nature is superdeterministic…” very closely relates to the arguments I made for many worlds: how relativity necessitates that one measurement could not have been made first, so therefore could not have caused the result of the other measurement.

I don’t want to detail this thread any further, so I’ll stop there.

I wouldn’t call randomness ‘enslavement’, but it doesn’t seem to be any more satisfying than determinism.

Why can’t what is not seemingly predictable be called imperfect, like humans act unpredictably and imperfectly?

We choose imperfectly among imperfect options. Simple.

Limits apply to nature, limits apply to us working within nature.

So we choose within the limits of imperfection.

If we view our world as imperfect rather than chaotic or random, where do we end up?

Wow, you really went all out for this post from what I was trying to describe.

Chaos is not complexity. They are different concepts.

Chaos is literally defined by ALWAYS having the same conditions and ALWAYS getting a different result.

Complexity is a bit different, it’s statistical in nature.

We actually don’t know how plasma televisions work, but we know that they work reliably, statistically.

That’s a good way to put it. I was reaching for something like that but couldn’t find the right words or analogy. It really does sound like that.