Managed to watch it once. Need to let that sink in and watch it again.
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In fact, I don’t really know where I formally am in this debate about free will. I’ve tried to find out an answer through the article below but rapidly got lost. Anyway, my position is that humans are not automatons. They are moral agents that are, to a certain degree, responsable for their acts. In which category this put me, I don’t know.
There is a case to be made that these are not mutually exclusive. One could, arguably, separate the issue of whether or not we are comfortable assigning blame and credit from the issue of whether or not anybody was ever truly able to decide to act differently than how they did.
At any rate, gut feelings aside, why do you reckon humans are not automatons? And in particular, setting aside how convincing current technology is at imitating humans, what test could you subject an individual to, that would reliably inform you of whether you were dealing with a man or a machine? That is to say, what is the practical, functional, identifiable difference that remains, even after all superficial discrepancies are erased?
Indeed. Joe Schmid of the Majesty of Reason has video responding to apologist Tren Horn’s claims about exactly this topic of free will and things like moral responsibility, and that even if there is no free will, there are still many positions one can take on the question of responsibility, blame, and so on that can have psychological and societal functions.
An obvious one is that by putting blame on people (and taking actions such as putting them in prison, or otherwise shunning them or shaming them for their actions) we see as violating the social norms in immoral ways, we create conditions that influence how both they and other people are likely to act in the future when they become aware of the consequences of such actions.
Regardless of whether we think we have free will, even supposing we are determined to act a certain way given a specific set of circumstances, placing moral responsibility isn’t supposed to motivate people to travel back in time and change their already committed actions, this is impossible. It could function as an incentive for people to modulate their behavior in the future. In other words, it’s intent is to create the very conditions we hope will make people refrain from behaving in ways we consider immoral when faced with similar situations.
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Exactly. Much of the debate over “free will” is really a debate over moral responsibility. That seems to me to be the crux of the disagreement between Robert Sapolsky and the late Dan Dennett in this debate. They otherwise agree on most other things:
If you knew why that was your position, you might know more. What does it take not to be an automaton? How would you tell if you were or weren’t?
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Watched again and googled “violation statistical independence” which led me to this paper
coauthored by Hossenfelder that seems to cover the same ground and features the same equation. Still baffled.
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I vaguely recalled reading something by Jerry Coyne on determinism, free will, and responsibility. Google search finds volumes.
ETA:
Just skimming the article. It’s… interesting. I do find things that baffle me also. Stopped in one place I found maybe might make a novel point, and found this, for instance:
In the limit p\to\infty, the set of such “rational” Hilbert states is dense in the projection of the quantum mechanical Hilbert-space. From this point of view, for large enough p, IST can be made as experimentally indistinguishable from quantum theory as one likes. This makes it difficult to devise experimental tests for this idea. Such tests must ultimately be based on the fact that, at the end of the day, p is some finite number.
That’s a diplomatic way of saying that their proposed alternative makes no testable predictions over and above the standard theory already established, isn’t it? The last sentence has a reference to an arXiv article that’s not passed peer review anywhere since 2021. Might look into it if prompted, but for now not diving too many levels deep.
With this IST explains why it is impossible to simultaneously measure conjugated variables in quantum mechanics with certainty. In quantum theory, this is a consequence of having non-commuting operators acting on a Hilbert-space, but is otherwise unexplained. (emphasis added)
What on earth is “otherwise” supposed to mean? It’s a mathematical inevitability of the formalism, consistently reproduced in experiment and crucial for the logical consistency of the rest of the theory and all of its predictions. If having an internally consistent and experimentally reliable model is not enough of an “explanation” in physics, then what on earth possibly ever could be? Not to mention the uncertainty principle also applies to classical phenomena, but somehow we never hear anyone complaining about that. Go figure…
Alas, the authors are not here to participate in this conversation. This is part of the reason I make it a habit to not address the sources in detail, be they videos or research articles. Those who produced them are usually not present to respond, and those who post them – even when to support their own claims, as is not even the case in this instance – typically are some combination of unwilling and unable to elaborate on or defend them. So there is scarcely a point in me reviewing them at all. If someone does feels qualified to comment, by all means, I’m all ears.
Falling in love for example
Why would love not be possible in a deterministic universe?
Please, elaborate. How is “falling in love” a test you can subject someone to in an effort to find out if they are a person or not? What sort of results of this test would indicate one or the other with any reliability?
Isn’t that the opposite of free will?
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It seems to me a better way of saying it is that neither option can be experimentally established as they are observationally indistinguishable. So that in fact we must remain agnostic on whether or not there is true indeterminacy to physical reality according to quantum theory. There could be, but we can’t tell without making an assumption we have no way of testing the veracity of.
That also seems to me to have been the overall message of the video.
I agree that it is probably the case that you don’t choose to fall in love. But it remains that falling in love is a human attribute not shared by automatons. Also note that humans have the capacity to choose a different path from the one mapped out by their feelings of love
Your original statement that “humans are not automatons” was in reference to the deterministic view that human thoughts and actions are entirely determined by external factors. I think the discussion about whether machines are capable of love is off topic, because humans are immensely more complex than any man-made machine. Although it might be theoretically possible to eventually invent a machine capable of love, the analogy between humans (within determinism) and machines breaks down due to the limitations of current technology. So, to bring the discussion back on topic, why is love impossible if determinism is true?
So it seems it is not really free will that you believe separates us from automatons. Rather, it is qualia.
Sounds like you have in advance defined humans as non-automatons. But does that have anything to do with free will?
… Unless humans are a type of automaton, which so far you have not named a reason to conjecture. As John Harshman is pointing out, this is circular. But regardless, my challenge was not to name a philosophically conceivable point of difference. My challenge was to provide a practical means of identifying that difference in the event that an automaton had been built that would outwardly behave human-like.
If they have free will, sure. By some definitions, in fact. But why do you reckon they do? If a human in love makes a choice, and an automaton in love makes that same choice, what can you do to test which is which? Even if you can go back in time and observe one of them make a different choice, how do you reckon that it was a matter of their free choosing, and not a random fluke in their mechanical decision maker chip? Likewise, if the other being is free to make their choice, they would not be subject to any such flukes, would they? They would freely choose their preferred path every time, not deviate at seemingly random.
In other words, from either observation one could both confirm and deny either being’s free will. Nothing about the mere possibility that a different outcome happens indicates freedom over chance, and nothing about a stable outcome indicates determinism over freedom. What you would actually need to confirm free will, therefore, is something other than an observation of behaviour from outside. But if you have to rely for your conclusion on strictly subjective experiences from the inside, then you’re faced with personal fallibility and a total lack of the possibility of external confirmation. Those are plenty good reasons to not trust what ever conclusion comes to us that way, in my opinion. What say you?
Automatons don’t have free will. So if humans are not automatons (and they are not), this destroys at least one way by which one could argue that humans don’t have free will.
Now, do you hold the deterministic view as explained below by Richard Cocks ?
Physical determinism is the notion that all events, including thoughts and actions, are the result of cause and effect. Each effect is the result of a prior cause. Each effect is also the cause of some new effect, creating an endless causal chain.
C→E/C→E/C . . .
From this point of view, every event is “necessary.” Given the cause, the effect must occur. Exactly what “must” and “necessary” mean here philosophers have found it difficult to say.
Every event is thought to be unavoidable in some way and a “necessary” consequence of preceding events.
If the Big Bang is taken as the first physical cause, then all subsequent events can be regarded as the result of that first cause, when time began. Thus, according to determinism, since the beginning of time, everyone’s thoughts and actions have been pre-determined and unavoidable. No deviation from this predestination is possible on this view. The “events” referred to would seem to include thoughts, on the assumption that brains generate consciousness.
For the record, here is the piece from which the above passage was taken