The Universe is Deterministic

[ben m]

Whats the point of life otherwise if you have no control over what you do?

That's a much harder question, isn't it? If I were you I would ask a philosopher or a poet or something.

However, the laws of physics do not care whether you are happy with their answer. There is no law of physics saying "Energy is conserved, entropy must rise in a closed system, and late-Holocene humans on Earth must be given a physico-philosophical basis for free will".

 

[Zeuzzz]

Meh. So I'm taking a scientific thread back to a philosophical perspective again. This should surely be a scientific issue though too, the incompatability between physics and conscious free will?

Check out William Tillers theories, his theories will be laughed at by most here for sure. But this is the kind of thing that I think may be proven in the future as we learn about the brain and consciousness.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kmgEQN4xro (Ignore stupid person interviewing him!)

Tiller belives that our consciousness is able to alter space below the atom level of reality, the vacum level, which creates a decrese in entropy and gives rise to our everyday experience.

William Tiller is a teacher, researcher, author and consultant, and is currently Professor Emeritus of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford University. He previously worked as an advisory physicist at Westinghouse Research Laboratories, and has published 275 scientific papers and three technical books in the field of materials science.

[....]When these processes are used and the gauge symmetry state of space is raised, the thermodynamic energy per unit volume of that state is raised. So for the very first time in human history we see a process going on very different from the normal one which is increase of entropy and degredadation of potential, we see the reverse; we see increase of potential, which probably means reduction of entropy.[....]

 

[Tubbythin]

So to get consciousness we violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Interesting.

 

[Belz...]

Yea.

Whats the point of life otherwise if you have no control over what you do?

Why ? Who cares ? Just live your life. Who cares if, in the end, it was all pre-determined ? You don't know the outcome in advance so it shouldn't trouble you.

What is "the outcome"? Please elaborate. This sounds like some sort of God character to me

More like circumstances.

 

[dlorde]

Whats the point of life otherwise if you have no control over what you do?

Science doesn't deal with the philosophical 'whys'. What's the point of a plant? A bacterium? a rock?

As for free will, it's quite compatible with determinism - it's just the perception that you, as a biological entity, made a choice that was subjectively free of external coercive influence. The choice is the result of an evaluation period involving the available alternatives and the varying state of your brain during that period. When the evaluation period is over, you take the action that 'wins out'. Putting it crudely, you act as a complex switch with many variables and plenty of feedback. It's free will because it's you that does the evaluation, with the preferences you have, and you feel that external influences will/did not significantly affect the outcome away from your preferred choice (i.e. the alternative that you project/model would 'win out' in the absence of such influences).

 

[sol invictus]

This should surely be a scientific issue though too, the incompatability between physics and conscious free will?

It's only a scientific issue if "conscious free will" is a scientific idea. So go ahead and define what you mean by that, then we can discuss how scientific it is.

 

[Zeuzzz]

It's only a scientific issue if "conscious free will" is a scientific idea. So go ahead and define what you mean by that, then we can discuss how scientific it is.

Conscious free will is the ability of conscious entities to make decisions that are not predetermined, compatibilism is the name given to the idea that free will can exist in a deterministic universe.

For example whilst a mechanistic system like a pendulum or a stars life cycle may be predetermined from an initial state, conscious decisions and the ability to make choices can not be predetermined.

Consider a loch system. The tide comes in and out in correspondance to the moons gravitational pull, and using basic physics you can always calculate what the depth of the water will be in the loch as the tide comes in and out. But these predictions will not hold true if someone comes along and blocks off the loch from the sea. Or if someone consciously decides to drain the loch. Or if a blue whale comes and consciously decides to position itself so it blocks off the lochs entrance.

 

[sol invictus]

Conscious free will is the ability of conscious entities to make decisions that are not predetermined, compatibilism is the name given to the idea that free will can exist in a deterministic universe.

For example whilst a mechanistic system like a pendulum or a stars life cycle may be predetermined from an initial state, conscious decisions and the ability to make choices can not be predetermined.

That's not at all what your source says. From your link:

For example, you could choose to continue reading or to stop reading this article; while a compatibilist determinist would not deny that whatever choice you make will have been predetermined since the beginning of time, they will argue that this choice that you make is an example of free will because no one is forcing you to make whatever choice you make. In contrast, someone could be holding a gun to your head and telling you that unless you read the article, he/she will kill you; to a compatibilist, that is an example of a lack of free will.

In other words, "free will" simply means that not every choice is determined by obvious external factors like a gun to your head. No one disagrees with that, and it poses no challenge to any theory of physics.

 

[Belz...]

Conscious free will is the ability of conscious entities to make decisions that are not predetermined

And do you care to show that this "free will" exists in actuality ?

 

[dlorde]

Conscious free will is the ability of conscious entities to make decisions that are not predetermined

Well naturally, if you define it to directly conflict with determinism, then there will be a problem trying to get them to work together. However, there's no apparent justification for defining it that way. It may feel like that, but is there a way to distinguish between not being able to predict the decision beforehand and it being un-predetermined? Is there some evidence of it being non-deterministic, some way to test it? If so, what?

Bear in mind that determinism is quite compatible with unpredictability.