Is there a skeptical/scientific argument against predeterminism?

[Chanakya]

Wait, okay, I get it: you're assuming the hemophilia was caused not by mechanistic, deterministic processes, but by some truly random quantum effect. Given that assumption, I agree, your argument holds.

But my larger point, my essential objection, stands: After all, much like hemophilia, we may be unable to predict some hurricane, for those exact same quantum-randomness-causing-butterfly-effect reasons, right? Yet, while not necessarily with literally cent per cent certitude, nevertheless we do know that weather systems are by and large deterministic and more or less predictable.

We cannot say the same for humans, yet. But why assume we never will be able to? After all, the only difference is degree of complexity. Why assume that human brain complexity represents some unscalable limit?

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Well, there are arguments that hinge on the complexity of the human brain, but mine isn't. In fact the perfect storm in Russian politics that happened back then is quite well explained at a macro level, Asimov style. What it hinges on is the CAUSE of all that: that a DNA strand broke, and it was a very specific piece that broke, in a very specific sperm cell. And that is a quantum effect, and thus purely random.

Even if we were to assume that we can predict exactly what each person's brain will decide in each given circumstance -- although, again, we don't really need that here -- you still need to predict that that situation will actually occur. And this one was purely random.

And it's more complex than predicting a hurricane, because here there are specific pieces that influence the whole disproportionately more than everything else, and thus don't average out in the way Asimov assumed they would. There were literally billions of DNA breaks in humans even just in the year that Victoria was conceived. The average human gets a couple of thousands DNA breaks per year just from C14 decay in your DNA. But not even all of them put together came even close to averaging the one break that caused Victoria to have that broken gene.

When specific pieces affect the whole that disproportionately more than others, you can't average things out.

 

[Chanakya]

You're right, you didn't speak of human brains at all. My bad, I kind of got carried away, there.

But then, minus the human brain complexity factor: Since random quantum factors can cause hemophilia in a human being, then surely random quantum factors can cause ... something, in a butterfly? And get it to flap its wings? Leading to a hurricane? So that that hurricane is, in theory, wholly unpredictable, at least before that particular butterfly hatched out.

Yet we're not arguing that weather systems are unpredictable, are we? So why are we saying that human affairs are necessarily indeterministic, even in theory? (If that is indeed what you're arguing!)

Leaving brain complexity out of the picture actually makes the comparison with weather systems (somewhat) more apples to apples.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

I'm saying that weather systems, for all their chaotic complexity, are driven by averages of billions of tons of air. Avogadro's number being 6.02214076×10²³ mol⁻¹, the effects of each mollecule are negligible. Whereas in the example I just gave, just ONE specific atom could cause a major effect, that was not mitigated nor depending on any averages.

Statistics may be able to tell you on the average how many people with haemophilia are born in a year or such, but can't tell you that specifically the crown prince of Russia will be one of them. And that situation was not driven by averages, but by a sample of exactly one.

 

[dann]

What you're thinking IS how your neurons are behaving, and there is a "why" behind both.
Everything is caused.

The theme I was dealing with was free will. If I decide to think of or do something else, other neurons will be involved. I never claimed that everything isn't caused.

If you stub your toe badly, you'll be thinking about how it hurts. Your thoughts are pretty clearly caused there.

... unless I'm preoccupied with something else. If I am, I'll probably ignore the pain. As a motorcyclist, I've encountered wasps a couple of times, one was in my helmet, the another one was on my chest. I never found out what happened to the one in my helmet. When I stopped and got it off, it had gone, and until then I was focussed on the road. The one inside my jacket stung me three times before I was able to stop and get my jacket off. Until then, I was able to ignore the pain.
At other times, I've had bruises that hurt quite a bit, yet I didn't remember how I got them - and it wasn't because I was drunk or otherwise anesthetized, but because other things had been more important at the time. You may have had similar experiences yourself. Hurting your toe may make you think of pain, but it's not at all a given.

All the other things you think are more or less the same, just usually more multifactorial and nuanced.

No, they also aren't.

 

[kellyb]

The theme I was dealing with was free will. If I decide to think of or do something else, other neurons will be involved. I never claimed that everything isn't caused.




... unless I'm preoccupied with something else. If I am, I'll probably ignore the pain. As a motorcyclist, I've encountered wasps a couple of times, one was in my helmet, the another one was on my chest. I never found out what happened to the one in my helmet. When I stopped and got it off, it had gone, and until then I was focussed on the road. The one inside my jacket stung me three times before I was able to stop and get my jacket off. Until then, I was able to ignore the pain.
At other times, I've had bruises that hurt quite a bit, yet I didn't remember how I got them - and it wasn't because I was drunk or otherwise anesthetized, but because other things had been more important at the time. You may have had similar experiences yourself. Hurting your toe may make you think of pain, but it's not at all a given.



No, they also aren't.

If you're on the road and focused on that, your current environment combined with your survival instinct will be the cause of your focus on driving.

Either way, you say you never claimed everything isn't caused. So, do you agree that your thoughts are caused?

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

TBH, I'm more wondering when did free will get derailed to mean "random". Because that would be the only thing that's uncaused. Of course people take decisions because of reasons. They may not be good reasons, they may not even be sane reasons, but they are reasons. The idea that you don't have free will if your decision is based on any data at all from the real world is the weakest sauce ever.

Not having free will means you have to take a certain decision, regardless of what your own reasons would be to do that or not do that. I.e., you don't actually have a choice to make. E.g., if I'm the blackjack dealer at a certain casino and I pulled an ace and a six, I MUST pull another card, regardless of whether I think it's a winning move or not. Now I pull a ten, and I MUST not hit again. It doesn't matter if I see that the player has two cards, and the face-up one is an ace, so there is a very high probability that he has more than 17 points and will probably win. I CAN'T attempt to hit again. I don't have that choice.

But more importantly, I don't see how it's relevant when the topic is predetermination. No, the future isn't predetermined in any case, because there will be a lot of purely random dice that the universe has to roll for the before situations you react to even come up or not. Whether or not your response to that stimulus would be certain, there is no telling if and when that situation will arise.

E.g., if you were a rich merchant in Russia as late as early 1904, is your future predetermined that the communists will show up to confiscate your wealth some 15 years later? No it's not, because even that late it's not predetermined that Alexei will be born, that he'll be a boy, and that he'll have a bad case of haemophilia. Depending on how those dice roll, the situations in your future may be very different.

 

[David Mo]

Well, there are arguments that hinge on the complexity of the human brain, but mine isn't. In fact the perfect storm in Russian politics that happened back then is quite well explained at a macro level, Asimov style. What it hinges on is the CAUSE of all that: that a DNA strand broke, and it was a very specific piece that broke, in a very specific sperm cell. And that is a quantum effect, and thus purely random.

Even if we were to assume that we can predict exactly what each person's brain will decide in each given circumstance -- although, again, we don't really need that here -- you still need to predict that that situation will actually occur. And this one was purely random.

And it's more complex than predicting a hurricane, because here there are specific pieces that influence the whole disproportionately more than everything else, and thus don't average out in the way Asimov assumed they would. There were literally billions of DNA breaks in humans even just in the year that Victoria was conceived. The average human gets a couple of thousands DNA breaks per year just from C14 decay in your DNA. But not even all of them put together came even close to averaging the one break that caused Victoria to have that broken gene.

When specific pieces affect the whole that disproportionately more than others, you can't average things out.

The inability to determine some variables of the particles that make up a ball of pool doesn't impede players from predict the movement of a ball of pool. Macro objects are not particles and Asimov is not a historian. He is a sci-fi writer.
Historians work on the same assumption than pool players. Ignorance of particular facts doesn't prevent to know the evolution of historical events at social level. Of course, the predictability of historical events is not alike Asimov's novels.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

The inability to determine some variables of the particles that make up a ball of pool doesn't impede players from predict the movement of a ball of pool. Macro objects are not particles and Asimov is not a historian. He is a sci-fi writer.
Historians work on the same assumption than pool players. Ignorance of particular facts doesn't prevent to know the evolution of historical events at social level. Of course, the predictability of historical events is not alike Asimov's novels.

As I was saying before, the point is that in history some variables are not averaged out, the same way it would be in a pool ball. There were probably a million haemophiliacs born between 1900 and the Russian revolution, but Alexei had a decisive role in it while the rest of them put together did not. That wasn't based on the average number of haemophiliacs, but on a sample of exactly one. Only one guy had that kind of disproportionate importance. You can average a billion billion mollecules in a pool ball into something deterministic, but you can't average the flip of one coin into being deterministic.

 

[David Mo]

What you're thinking IS how your neurons are behaving, and there is a "why" behind both.
Everything is caused.

If you stub your toe badly, you'll be thinking about how it hurts. Your thoughts are pretty clearly caused there. All the other things you think are more or less the same, just usually more multifactorial and nuanced.

You don't know if everything is caused. Science and rational knowledge work like if everything would be caused. This is a basic methodological rule: If you don't know the cause of a phenomenon look for it.
In fact, we don't know the causes of a lot of events. Specially in human behaviour. This is why in psychology we speak of motivations rather than causes.

 

[David Mo]

As I was saying before, the point is that in history some variables are not averaged out, the same way it would be in a pool ball. There were probably a million haemophiliacs born between 1900 and the Russian revolution, but Alexei had a decisive role in it while the rest of them put together did not. That wasn't based on the average number of haemophiliacs, but on a sample of exactly one. Only one guy had that kind of disproportionate importance. You can average a billion billion mollecules in a pool ball into something deterministic, but you can't average the flip of one coin into being deterministic.

Majority of academic historians think that the "disproportionate" importance of some individuals diminish when one zooms forward the scope and focuses on social evolution instead of particular events. Probably the eruption of the socialist revolution in Russia would have happened with Rasputin or without, with Lenin or without. Circumstances were given.

 

[kellyb]

Of course people take decisions because of reasons. They may not be good reasons, they may not even be sane reasons, but they are reasons. The idea that you don't have free will if your decision is based on any data at all from the real world is the weakest sauce ever.

Not having free will means you have to take a certain decision, regardless of what your own reasons would be to do that or not do that.

No, not having free will means that the reasons alone cause whatever decision is made.

Because our thoughts and feelings are caused, our choices are also caused, in spite of the illusion of them being "free".

 

[kellyb]

You don't know if everything is caused. Science and rational knowledge work like if everything would be caused. This is a basic methodological rule: If you don't know the cause of a phenomenon look for it.
In fact, we don't know the causes of a lot of events. Specially in human behaviour.

Just because the causes are too complex to reliably figure out does not mean or even imply that causes do not exist.

 

[David Mo]

Just because the causes are too complex to reliably figure out does not mean or even imply that causes do not exist.

That the principle of causality be a rule of method instead of a description of facts doesn't entail that causes don't exist or that really everything has a cause. It means that we don't know if some events have actually a cause.

 

[kellyb]

That the principle of causality be a rule of method instead of a description of facts doesn't entail that causes don't exist or that really everything has a cause. It means that we don't know if some events have actually a cause.

We don't know that magic does not exist, either. The list of things we do not technically know is almost infinitely long.

 

[dann]

If you're on the road and focused on that, your current environment combined with your survival instinct will be the cause of your focus on driving.

Either way, you say you never claimed everything isn't caused. So, do you agree that your thoughts are caused?

No, I don't, and you make the same mistake again: Anything may make me think about it. A sudden, unexpected loud noise, for instance. But it is up to me what I think about it, i.e. my thoughts.
Your post is obviously what made think about the idea you present in it. But my decision to consider your idea and criticizing it the way I do isn't caused by by your post. I had several other options. I could have ignored it, for instance. That was entirely up to me. You didn't make me think what I think.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Majority of academic historians think that the "disproportionate" importance of some individuals diminish when one zooms forward the scope and focuses on social evolution instead of particular events. Probably the eruption of the socialist revolution in Russia would have happened with Rasputin or without, with Lenin or without. Circumstances were given.

As I showed before, most of those reasons can be traced to the SAME cause. It's not just for example, whether the economy going down the drain or the backlash against the incompetent government or the backlash against the Tsar's military leadership of the army could cause the revolution without the haemophiliac prince or not, it's that all four can be traced to the SAME root cause. Without a haemophiliac prince, you have no Rasputin dictating to the Tsarina what should be done, and then you don't have official positions sold to incompetent twits for sexual favours by Rasputin, nor would you have the Tsar taking personal command of the military, and thus the other three reasons for anger against the government disappear too.

I don't think any historian is prepared to say that the revolution would have happened even if you removed all four main causes for it. Because that's no longer history, it's rationalizing some kind of magical predeterminism.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

No, not having free will means that the reasons alone cause whatever decision is made.

Because our thoughts and feelings are caused, our choices are also caused, in spite of the illusion of them being "free".

Mate, again, if your choices have no reasons, then they're random.

 

[kellyb]

No, I don't, and you make the same mistake again: Anything may make me think about it. A sudden, unexpected loud noise, for instance. But it is up to me what I think about it, i.e. my thoughts.
Your post is obviously what made think about the idea you present in it. But my decision to consider your idea and criticizing it the way I do isn't caused by by your post. I had several other options. I could have ignored it, for instance. That was entirely up to me. You didn't make me think what I think.

Do you think what you think about things is caused on any level at all?

I'd say your decision to post was caused by numerous factors such as 1) having memories of previous times you've thought about this topic, 2) your current environment of having the time to post your thoughts, 3) ect. and so on.

eta:
dann...can I get you to think about this from another angle?

Think about someone you've known, who "objectively" has made really bad life choices. If you were born with the exact same genetic makeup as them, and had had 100% of the exact same experiences as they had from the moment of conception onwards, do you really think you would have done things differently from them?

 

[kellyb]

Mate, again, if your choices have no reasons, then they're random.

Agreed.

I don't understand why you say "Not having free will means you have to take a certain decision, regardless of what your own reasons would be to do that or not do that" when your reasons to do or not do things are, in whole or in part, the causes of your choices, though.