How would it differ in appearance from a caused event?
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Free will and self awareness
- Thread starter 1137
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Contradictory outcomes with equal probability from the same cause cannot be hard determinism. Something you would consider random is considered free agency when you have true freedom between x and y. When it is equal probability from the same effect there cant be anything tipping it one way or the other.
Skwim
Veteran Member
Right, which is why I said " if there's such a thing as equal probability . . . ." because I was mearly going along with your assumption, not endorsing it.
Perhaps I would, but we're not talking about anyone having true freedom, whatever that is . We're talking about an utterly uncaused action: "utter randomness"---please note the "utter."
Right, which, again, is why I don't go along with it. Your premise was faulty.
1) There is no consensus on what "random" is, and we have several different definitions (ML-random, using Kolmogorov complexity, other set-theoretic metrics over some interval, algorithmic metrics, etc.)
2) The only widely agreed non-deterministic systems (those we describe using QM) are probabilistic. Typically, we have a range of possible outcomes and impossible outcomes. So whatever "utter randomness" might be, quantum processes don't seem to fit and they also aren't deterministic.
1) The big bang (going to some other cosmology where infinitely many universes bubble up and expand, or to a continually inflating/collapsing universe, or any alternative still leaves you with uncaused events)
2) The cause of instantaneous correlated actions between two quantum systems separated by miles
3) Several hundred atoms being detected as in two places/states at once
4) What causes experimenters to be able to run an experiment with e.g. an electron and after the experiment is over then to arbitrarily decide whether or not they want their results to show a localized "particle" or a nonlocalized "wave", and get those results (i.e., after the experiment, but before detecting the results, the researchers can pick what whether they want the results to show something that is localized like a "particle" or spread out like a "wave").
5) Consciousness (if you can tell me that one, and through an email or something private, then destroy or delete all your copies, I'd appreciate it; I wouldn't even have to finish grad school as they'd just give me a PhD along with a Nobel prize).
6) Circular causality in complex systems
That's enough for starters. You have 2 hours, and I expect 110% accuracy (also, you'll need to explain how you were able to achieve that).
Sha'irullah
رسول الآلهة
Self Awareness is nothing but a higher evolved state of the lack of free will. All things are ruled by biology, natural laws and the involvement of external effects. Free will is an absolute illusion and does not exist simply exist in a universe with life such as what is known
1. Unknown cause =/= no cause, nor can causality be applied outside space / time anyways.
2. Again, unknown cause =/= no cause.
3. Need to read into this more.
4. The universe is weird, not magical.
5. There more than enough reason to believe consciousness is caused by mental processes. Again, lack of a full model doesn't contradict ALL logic and evidence, which supports consciousness being physical.
6. Elaborate?
You seem to be quite a quantum mystic.
Sha'irullah
رسول الآلهة
Your wife is raped. A long investigation turns up that the rape was actually an uncaused event. No villain, your wife just want from not raped to raped for no reason. This is a solid explanation in your books, huh?
Is this post referring to me? Sorry little confused here
No, I have no idea where you stand.
1) Species don't evolve such that they possess "higher" anything in general. Evolution only has a direction locally, and that will change as no environment is constant.
2) How does one have a higher or better lack of something?
3) Self-awareness by definition requires a concept of self that an agent reflects upon in such a way as to be aware. Until you can tell me how this is possible via classical, deterministic reductionism, then it isn't saying much.
Yes. However, as the only way biologists have been able to "fully" model living systems is through a systems approach (which violates known physics), this doesn't tell us much. It's less useful than quantum consciousness or emergence. At least such theories have testable components and analogues, even if they rely on different kinds of speculations we can't currently test.
I was at an APA conference in DC not long ago, and a lot of the exhibitors were book companies that publish academic series, textbooks, reference material, etc. One was Springer (probably the largest publisher of scientific journals, monographs, textbooks, volumes, etc., around), and one of the new books was Is Science Compatible with Free Will? It was, alas, outside of my price range, but luckily Springer has begun to include its books within its online database and I have access (although downloading a chapter at a time is annoying and I hate not being able to hold what I'm reading). I was primarily interested because one chapter/paper was by Gisin, the physicist who published the first test of nonlocal correlations at extreme distances (Aspect being the first to test it at all). He's "a name" in physics. He also believes that science is compatible. So does Penrose (an atheist) and Stapp (not sure about his religious views but he critiques Eccles's theory because it "brings in a kind of 'soul'").
But this isn't the only over-priced volume written by and (usually) for specialists. In 2010, Oxford University Press (OUP) put out Free Will and Consciousness, a volume with papers by PhDs from MIT, Cornell, Berkeley (that was Searle), etc. 2 years before that the same OUP put out Are We Free? with papers mostly from cognitive psychologists from some of the top cog. sci. centers in the world.
Actually, it wasn't even the first volume put out recently by Springer. In 2009, Springer's series Springer Complexity (which includes at least one monograph/volume series and some journals) put out Downward Causation and the Neurobiology of Free Will. It wasn't great, but at least one of the contributors is on the editorial board for Advances in Consciousness Research (alongside such notables as David Chalmers, Searle, Ray Jackendoff, and others whom those who keep up on these things would likely recognize). It's a volume/monograph series (akin to a peer-reviewed journal, but as these can only feature paper-length studies editorial boards also put out series), and it regularly gets into the how's, what's, and why's, of consciousness and free will.
Chalmers' is also on the editorial board of the series Philosophy of Mind, which published Hodgson's Rationality + Consciousness = Free Will (I'm not sure if the equation is correct, but the publishing company was again OUP) as well as Beyond Reduction and other pro-free will monographs.
Then there are the individual volumes or monographs by academic publishing companies that are behind e.g., Free Will as an Open Scientific Problem (MIT Press), The Mechanical Mind (Routledge), the volume Being Reduced (OUP), Did my Neurons Make me Do It? (OUP), the volume Does Consciousness Cause Behavior? (MIT press), the numerous books and volumes with papers written by physicists, neuroscientists, and MDs, etc., that are published in Springer's series The Frontiers Collection, one of which (Stapp's 3rd edition of Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics) containing material going back to a journal paper he wrote on the Copenhagen interpretation in the 70s I believe, and that's just some of the books I happen to own. I'm sick of listing them and they pale in comparison to what is out there and even that has nothing on the number of peer-reviewed studies dealing with consciousness and free will.
Basically, I wouldn't write it off so quickly.
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Skwim
Veteran Member
Take it as an uncaused event.
That's okay. It's an emphasis meant to forestall any argument that might assert some unknown or unknowable cause.
That doesn't help either. We have those all the time so far as we know. In fact, all reality is built upon uncaused events. That's without getting into circular causality. "The" example is cellular metabolism and repair (M-R). This is a function of cellular activity, in that component parts working together what we label as M-R. However, the function itself also causes the component parts to do what it is that they do. So I can arbitrarily decide that some set of parts and processes is either a cause or an effect. But I can't demonstrate why either set should belong to "causes" or to "effects".
Ah.
I don't think this is uncaused. This process has come to be through causation (like genetic mutation / evolution). Just because the process is circular does not make it uncaused. This is horrible reasoning.
First, you seem to think I referred to one type of process. I didn't. The quantum-to-classical transition, or "recovery" of the classical world from quantum physics, is based upon the idea that quantum mechanics ultimately describes everything. The reason we don't observe things like entanglement is because quantum processes tend to collapse or decohere very quickly before the mass of an entity even reaches the size of an atom. However, the cause of this process, whereby the processes that characterize quantum physics "become" the reality we experience a reality, is unknown. Also, this realm does not follow classical logic: an entity can be one thing and something else at once, can instantaneously display behavior that must be linked to the behavior of some other system separated by a potentially infinite distance with no known cause (or even any analogue in classical physics), and in general does not follow the causal logic that we are used to.
I never said it was uncaused. However, if you cannot tell me whether x causes y or y causes x (as is the case here), of what use is your causal model? If we have a system Z that can reduced into various sets X and Y of properties and of processes, and I can freely choose from among these sets any set X that causes Y, or the reverse, what have you said other than that you think causally? I can pick and choose what causes what, and this is incorporated into your causal model because you need there to be causes and effects. When you insist that arbitrary choice, which somehow makes some set of processes and properties either causes or effects, doesn't in anyway challenge your claim that every cause has an effect, then that seems like it is just you forcing systems to fit into your preconceptions.
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How would an investigation prove "no villain" rather than "villain got away clean"?Your wife is raped. A long investigation turns up that the rape was actually an uncaused event. No villain, your wife just want from not raped to raped for no reason. This is a solid explanation in your books, huh?