Also I see we've reached the "quantum uncertainty means free will" part. I've never understood that, because it seems to be a misunderstanding of what quantum uncertainty is. The phrase "quantum uncertainty" is usually meant to refer to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. The problem is that as I understand it, the uncertainty principle deals with knowledge, not physical states. It says that pairs of attributes, such as the momentum and position of a particle, cannot be known simultaneously beyond a certain level of precision. Essentially it is saying that at the subatomic scale, increasing the precision with which one knows the momentum of a particle decreases the precision with which one knows its position. What this does not say, however, is that the position or momentum of a particle are not facts. They are what they are. The limits are upon the certainty to which we can know them. So it's really hard to see what people mean when this is cited as a counterargument to the sort of thing Frylock is suggesting. I'm undecided, with a slight lean in Frylock's direction. I think most of us recoil to the idea for emotional reasons, and have heard very few convincing rational responses to the idea over the years. Even from people who have spent years thinking about it. It's the cognitive dissonance of having no real retort to something that just feels wrong. It tends to be "Well no, we have free will because I feel like I do and YOU'RE STUPID." Personally, I find these discussions ultimately lead to little beyond navel-gazing, for two reasons: (1) Ultimately, both sides are presenting unfalsifiable hypotheses. Trakiel says he could have had Cinnamon Toast Crunch and that he chose not to. Frylock says no, you've been destined to eat that toast since the Big Bang. Ultimately, there is no conceivable test that could show one person being right. We can't have a do-over, and if the situation occurs again, it is different because the specifications have changed. (2) Suppose Frylock is right. We have no free will. What does this imply? That we should change how we think, because of our own lack of free will? Ah, there's the rub of it. We can't. If there's no free will, we have no choice but to think what we think, and do what we do. At the end of the day, it is as Christopher Hitchens said. We must act as if free will exists, because there is no alternative.
No, I understand the nuance. I understand that Frylock was not saying that my decision whether or not to eat the toast was predetermined, thus negating my notion of free will; he's saying that there was ever a choice at all - that [choice] is the illusion. Since the [generally defined] concept of free will can only exist in the context of choices, and absence of any choice, the concept of free will is meaningless. I reject this conclusion because it's condradictory to reality: if free will cannot even be conceptualized, then nobody could ever debate its existence - yet here we are right here in this thread. It's not that quantum uncertainly proves that free will exists; it's that quantum uncertainy ensures that free will can never be proven to not exist. Here are two premises that I think we can agree are valid: 1. Humans do not know all of the laws governing our reality. 2. Even given the laws we're fairly sure of, our understanding dictates that certain things cannot be known. (this is where the uncertainy principle comes in). Given these two premises, we can conclude that even if everything that happens does so due to physical/biological/mathematical laws that govern reality, our limited understanding of those laws means that it's possible that there are laws that govern how free will works; we simply have not discovered them. Furthermore, even if they are discovered, those laws may infer that - like the uncertainty principle - free will cannot be quantitatively measured. The kind of guy who gets hungry at night due to all the cheering he did toward his city's professional basketball team's great win that evening. Since you cannot know what that's like, it's understandable you may think it's weird.
I don't see how that follows at all. We have lots of words for things that end up not actually existing. And vigorous debates about them too: the fact that aether does not exist didn't stop us from defining it, thinking it exists, or debating its existence for decades. Merely discussing something doesn't make it so. I think I am missing why you mean by "conceptualize." Well, technically it doesn't dictate that, it dictates that certain things cannot be known simultaneously. It's an either/or, at least to the relevant degrees of precision. But yes, you have a point here. The thing is, it's not a point for or against either side. It's merely in favor of both "Our minds are like other things in nature" and "our minds are different from other things" being equally unprovable assumptions. I think there is something to be said for the theoretical economy of "our molecules are probably a lot like those other molecules;" on the other had, it has the downside of jarring with our subjective lived experience.
Exactly right. However, it is not so jarring when you consider the common limitations of what humans find easy and hard to comprehend. A big difference, in my mind, between a ball rolling down a hill and a human making decisions is the complexity of the system, yes, but also because the human decision-maker is like a control system with feedback. That is, some of the system's outputs are wired into some of the system's inputs (either directly or indirectly). You have the ability to observe and analyze your own behavior, and even (what you consider to be) your decision-making process. Systems with feedback are understandable, but they're much harder to understand than most things we encounter on an everyday basis. People who study control systems learn enough math to figure out how they work and predict (and control) their behavior. Rockets have complex control systems on them. When a modern rocket fires, it's not naturally stable all by itself. There's a computer in there sensing all kinds of aspects of the ascent and then actuating things (fins, engines, little thrusters) to modify the ascent. However, every change made by the system modifies the ascent further, so there's a feedback loop. With enough math, you can learn how to design the system so it dampens out unwanted changes instead of amplifying them - moving the system toward convergence/stability vs. divergence/chaos. Have you ever been dragging a two-wheeled cart or some luggage on rollers when you go over a bump and it starts wobbling back and forth from wheel-to-wheel? If you don't stop and let it settle, then you're likely to try to apply some force to the handle to try to arrest the wobbling. I find this works about half the time. Sometimes I end up reducing the wobbling, and sometimes I amplify it, and the whole damn thing tips over. This is because my brain and my hand aren't working a very effective feedback control system. These systems are hard to understand because of the cause-effect-cause-effect feedback loop. That doesn't mean they are un-understandable or non-deterministic in some way. When the control system on a rocket adjusts a fin to stabilize the ascent, is it making a decision to do that - in the same way you decide to eat toast? After all, it's taking inputs from sensors, applying some experience/logic designed into it, and making a change, and then doing that over and over again. Basically that's how you work, too. If I asked how the control system made its decision, it would actually be really hard to explain and certainly non-intuitive - but that doesn't impart the system with "free will."
I'm not a quantum physicist, but read Michael Crichton's Timeline once (and saw the movie!), and I also just skimmed some wikipedia articles, so I'd like to weigh in. I like to entertain a multiverse theory, but I don't think the universes simply diverge at our decisions (that's pretty arrogant), but they diverge at a sub-atomic particle level. If you magnify the scale of units of time as much as you can, I'd imagine it as being when sub-atomic particles change position (let's just say they all do at once, to keep it simple), which can be quite random. When these particles change position, new universes are created, each one accounting for all the possible new positions the the particles could be in. I picture this model as an ever expanding foam of univervse bubbles, expanding in at least four dimensions (if not more). The amount of universes would be nigh on impossible to fathom for a human mind; a nanosecond could include an exponentially inordinate amount of different (but almost identical) universes. These universes wouldn't just be sci-fi staple "zigged when I zagged," "donuts rain from the sky," "this world is ruled by guinea pigs" type alternate universes, but rather, they just represent every possibility that emenated from a central point (i.e. the "big bang"). Our "straight line" experience of time just follows one of the threads through these possibilities. In this way I'd say that free-will and determinism kind of co-exist: That there isn't only one possible future for each of us, but the paths would deviate in ways we could barely percieve. But let's not listen to me, let's see what Robert Powell has to say, via Russell Brand (Edit: I couldn't work the link properly, jump to 4:41): Spin on that!
I don't really believe in free will. Biological determinism, bitches! That said, determinism is indistinguishable from free will, as the existence of this discussion shows. So it doesn't really matter. You're not thinking outside the box enough, Frylock. If there is no free will, it is not your cousin's choice to murder people - but it's also not your choice to lock him up. Ain't that a bitch? Hence my saying it doesn't really matter. In any case, I gave up thinking about this stuff a long time ago.
In this scenario, though, the rocket's computer was designed to anticipate the necessary actions to maintain stability because an engineer designed it to do exactly that. There's no real choice there because the rocket, presumably, hasn't been given the ability to choose whether or not it would like to stabilize itself or suddenly destabilize and self-destruct. It's only "choices" are aimed at stabilization. Using your analogy, the man eating toast was only designed (or destined, or predetermined) to eat toast. But the human system has many more variables that allow for choices to be made. There is not simply toast or no toast. He could have just as easily had a bagel, or a piece of fruit, or a pile of dog shit outside. Comparing humans to a computer, to me, implies design--that every step of the way, the means to an end have been set in motion to assure that end will happen. Short of death being that end, I don't buy into that.
Yep, we have free will ... within certain concrete parameters. Metaphorically speaking, we're a cow in a paddock. We can choose to eat grass, drink water, go to sleep, stand in the sun, rest in the shade and so on. Internally we're driven by certain urges to cater to biological necessities (hungry, thirsty, tired, feeling cold, feeling hot etc), and we can affect these to a point. But we're still stuck in a paddock, and we're still going to get butchered at some point - and these are things that we have little to no control over. Free will is overrated as a concept, which often leads to the calls that it does not exist. "Free will" is not an escape from the drudgery of life - it is the way in which you affect a small piece of that drudgery for a limited period of time.