Submitted by greghickey5 t3_113ecst in philosophy
dbx999 t1_j8rt8bs wrote
Reply to comment by gashmol in Free Will Is Only an Illusion if You Are, Too by greghickey5
Randomness should be considered as deterministic. The flip of a coin over time reveals the deterministic nature of randomness, falling in line with the elegant orderly pattern of 50% heads and 50% tails. Chaos and uncertainty turns into order and predictable over an aggregate.
Your life is one toss of one coin.
So when you land one way, you will feel as if you chose the side to land on. But it is all the forces acting on you from outside of you that determined that outcome. And if you pull back that perspective to a population of 8 billion other humans, the predictable order that humans follow the same rules as flipped coins and viruses becomes evident.
We may be sentient but we may only be witnesses to our own existence. Passenger of my soul, eyewitness of my fate. Not master or captain.
SpoddyCoder t1_j8t4l40 wrote
Another way to view randomness as the same as deterministic was posited by John Conway when developing the free-will theorem…
Imagine rolling all the random numbers you need for the universe’s lifetime in advance. Then simply pull them out in the order of their use… gives the illusion of total random outcomes for events - but they were still determined before the event.
dbx999 t1_j8t6kva wrote
Another simplistic demonstration I found neat is this distribution of balls which despite the random falling behavior of each individual ball, ultimately reveals an orderly outcome of an aggregate population of balls - and consistently behaves this way over and over when the process is repeated.
So if we imagine ourselves as being one single ball, then we will feel as though the paths we “choose” will be either random or even made by our free will to pick between a right or left direction at each collision and crossroads that we encounter - and where we end up may feel as though we chose our adventure. However, the fact we all together as a group behave in such a predictable way as to repeat the bell curved distribution contradicts the idea that individual choice is separate and independent from determinism.
Our choices are not only limited (we cannot for instance choose to violate physical laws of the universe - so we’re constrained to choices bracketed inside parameters) but our choices are ultimately following a grander deterministic set of rules. What you choose and what I choose may seem independent of one another - and independent of the choices of everyone in our population- yet we will fall within a bell curve and the bell curve will be established each time by our so called choices.
We have no more free will than each of those little falling balls. Randomness exists but randomness leads to both order and predictability and consistency. Randomness does not equal complete chaos. It is merely a process to carry one thing from one state to another state and there is nothing chaotic about that process, only that from the perspective of the individual in motion, the future is opaque until it becomes the present.
frnzprf t1_j8w270m wrote
It's like shuffling a deck of cards.
Auctorion t1_j8rwakg wrote
Except that there are aspects of quantum mechanics that, as far as we know, are totally random and non-deterministic, e.g. radioactive decay. Now you might say that these events don't percolate up to our scale, but bypassing discussion of whether they do, we can make them percolate up. If you defer decision making to a quantum random number generator you would have an event on our scale that could not have been predicted. A deterministic event horizon.
dbx999 t1_j8ta8sf wrote
I think we’re trying to shoehorn the concept that true chaos exists and “percolates” to disrupt a clean deterministic system. However I’m not convinced this is the case.
Let’s look at the ratio of pi. Its values consist of unpredictable seemingly random strings of digits. Randomness therefore exists?
Well - that’s in pure mathematics so does this even apply to a physical world? Not sure if these two can bridge the gap between the conceptual math to material reality.
Say some value of some phenomenon seems random. like your radioactive decay. I’m still not sure if that proves anything. What if the observed radioactive decay when aggregated forms a more cohesive pattern akin to the bell curves and distribution of other phenomena? My point was to say that seemingly random events such as the flip of a coin become not random when aggregated. And maybe that is also the case in your example.
Auctorion t1_j8tk86z wrote
>I think we’re trying to shoehorn the concept that true chaos exists and “percolates” to disrupt a clean deterministic system.
It's not shoehorning at all though, is it? Humans exist. Humans can leverage quantum probability. That is all that is needed because we act as a conduit for the micro, medium, and macro scales to interact in ways they may not absent the involvement of intelligence. Left alone, our Sun will become a white dwarf in about 5 billion years. If humans stick around long enough, it's likely we'll find a way to prevent that. If we decided whether to let the Sun burn itself out or to refuel it based on the roll of a quantum RNG, that would be a piece of quantum randomness affecting the lifecycle of stars. Scale it up. Even if you consider it to be shoehorning, it doesn't matter. It's still disruption to the supposedly clean deterministic system.
>Let’s look at the ratio of pi. Its values consist of unpredictable seemingly random strings of digits. Randomness therefore exists?
Pi isn't random. It's irrational. Its numbers don't change, it's properties aren't in flux- they just require discovery. Fun aside: we only need 40 digits of pi to calculate the circumference of the universe to within an error margin smaller than a hydrogen atom, but last summer we knew over 62.8 trillion digits of pi.
>What if the observed radioactive decay when aggregated forms a more cohesive pattern akin to the bell curves and distribution of other phenomena?
Then my beliefs will adjust based on the evidence because these are beliefs founded upon the evidence, not beliefs that cherry pick evidence in support of beliefs I intend to hold regardless.
SnapcasterWizard t1_j8sr3d8 wrote
>totally random and non-deterministic, e.g. radioactive decay
Its not totally random, from the perspective of an individual atom it appears to be. But if you have enough atoms then there is a clear non-randomness to the decay.
Look at it like this, if it were truly random, then different atoms couldn't have different half lives.
Auctorion t1_j8ss3va wrote
Totally random doesn’t mean 100% absolute maximum random, just as free will doesn’t mean the ability to ignore causality. It means that the specific moment of decay cannot, by any known means, be predicted even if you know the window.
frnzprf t1_j8w1zuv wrote
Randomness is a weird concept. I think you can replace it with "unpredictable".
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Predictability depends on an individual perspective. When physicists say that quants are random, they say that noone will ever be able to predict their behaviour.
bakmanthetitan329 t1_j8xm020 wrote
I try to use the term "causal determinism" in discussions of free will. The progression of the state of the universe is strictly caused by the state of the universe (and nothing else), although it may not be a priori determinable from the state.
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