John Page

I think we agree in part, I had jumped to considering the effect of having hypothetical outcomes influence our decision making. But this question itself arises from a hypothetical situation so we are led to ask "What if there were no hypothetical questions?".

I still think the mechanism of "hypotheticals" are a mechanism for exploration, though, allowing us to review and project what we have learned from sense data. That we can choose internally from one of number of projected "futures" extends our control over reality. Evolution then becomes an "outguessing" game.

Maybe I'm still misunderstanding you.

Cheers, John

NialScorva

That's why I'm increasingly in favor of a strong metaphysical noncognitivism.

Gurdur

The question is also why some are so determined to preach psychological determinism as a given fact, a very dogmatic and non-scientific stance.
As any cursory examination of the academic research on this will tell you, opinions are split all ways; there is no set consensus of opinion in the scientific community on this matter, not even only among the psychologists.

Also given that response was in answer to LiquidRage, I must confess I simply do not share LiquidRage's intuitionalist notion of determinism being true because it's somehow magically so obvious. Just blame my reservations on my scientific training.

Again a misrepresentation of the various stances involved, and a great over-simplification apparent in the original premises.
Not only that, but they also build models of processing systems that give a reasonable approximation of what is popularly known as "free will".
IOW, research into this whole area is going on; to pretend we have now the Truth ™ and to preach it is simply agitprop, not science.
uh uh, uh uh, naw, they also include self-reinforcing and self-scrutinising virtual circuits, random influences and "choice" of self-reinforcement.
A misrepresentation ignoring the research directions noted above (among others).

Dennett is hardly the only person in this area.
Or to put in another way:

The picture on soft determinism (hard determinism being a non-goer) and what is popularly known as "free will" is so complex, that as yet the results can be interpreted either way, leading to the whole argument as ever becoming bogged down in tediously sophist definitions at the end.

________________

I will be saying much more on all of this soon, , soon as I have free time left over from the somewhat more productive task of renovation of my new house.

Gurdur

Which of course would fail to explain creativity and new ideas.
Soner or later, those must come into this discussion.

[ June 23, 2002: Message edited by: Gurdur ]</p>

excreationist

I think that creativity and new ideas are just rehashed old ideas that are recombined in order to satisfy a goal. Basically we can learn patterns from one area and apply them to another area. It basically is about problem solving where solutions are inferred using previous experiences.
I can't think of any good examples at the moment... maybe someone could offer some examples of new ideas that are very creative?
Maybe the act of inventing cubism could be said to be creative.... well maybe the inventor of it was bored with all of the other styles and so his goal was to invent a new style of drawing. After some trial and error he would have come up with a style which is sufficiently different (new) and so the problem had been solved. Usually lines and shapes are used to represent objects in a straight-forward way. Cubism just distorts it all (it uses squares or something).

Liquidrage

Please give me an example of a truely original idea.

Liquidrage

Originally posted by Gurdur:
Also given that response was in answer to LiquidRage, I must confess I simply do not share LiquidRage's intuitionalist notion of determinism being true because it's somehow magically so obvious. Just blame my reservations on my scientific training.

I've never said it was magically obvious.

All I've ever said is that every physics experiement ever performed has shown to be deterministic. And I see no reason to suggest humanity has any capability to escape these rules.
Is our brain matter not effected by gravity and EM and the Strong and Weak nuclear forces?

Do you actually read any of the posts you reply to Gurdur?
Some people redefined free will to keep the term not the meaning. It had nothing to do with claiming victory over free-willists. It was stating the obvious. If you present a view of free will that is in fact deterministic you shouldn't be using the term free will then. That word is already defined.

excreationist

I don't know much about science but I was wondering about radioactive decay... within a radioactive isotype's(?) half-life, half of them decay. Is there a way of working out which ones will decay and at what times? If so, then it would sound like it could be possible to get the long-lasting particles and put them all together so that *none* of them decay within the half-life...

Liquidrage

No, this falls more in line with "scientific determinism" which includes the ability to predict the future. The red herring of "the ability to predict the future" doesn't belong to determinism. Which is why it's important to note the difference between "determinism" and "scientific determinism". The latter being a phrase that was invented to deal with this red herring.

The science you mention is due to the interactions between the protron and the electron.
Quantum uncertainty tells us that as this level we cannot predict the future with 100% accuracy and can only speak of probabilities.

This leads us to interpretations of Quantum Mechanics. I'll quote the renowned physicist Jon Bell from "The Ghost in the Atom" for this.

In regards to quantum uncertainty and the famous <a href="http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Quantum/bells_inequality.html" target="_blank">EPR</a> experiment.
---
John Bell: "You know one way of understanding this business is to say that the world is super deterministic. That not only is inanimate matter deterministic, but we, the experimenters who imagine we can choose to do one experiment rather then another, are also determined. If so, the difficulty which this experimental result creates disappears."

Interviewer: "Free will is an illusion - that gets us out of this crisis, does it?"

John Bell: "That's correct. In the analysis it is assumed that free will is genuine..."
---

It should be noted that the experiment mentioned is now consider invalid. Though that is irrelevant since if it was valid it would only validate quantum uncertainty, not the interpretation of it.

In other words, if the wave is shown to be uncertain then determinism is the simplest interpretation. Plugging free will into uncertainty makes QM a lot more complicated.

If the wave is not uncertain determinism is the only interpretation.

Determinism, despite being unable to predict the future, is the simplest interpretation of quantum uncertainty.
Probability waves know how and where they will collapse before they ever do. Even if human intervention (observation) is the cause of the collapse. The wave reveals (and possibly carries) only the information needed for the collapse.

It was the presupposition of free will in regard to quantum uncertainty and the collapse of the probability wave (well that and a mistake by Von Nueman) that killed theorectical discussions of interpretations of quantum mechanics for nearly 60 years.
Thankfully, we now appear to be out of the temporal dark age. John Wheeler be damned.

Gurdur

D'oh !
You said beforehand in <a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=56&t=000214&p=" target="_blank">the last thread we encountered each other</a> that to you it was just so "obvious".
Here from that thread is what you said:
Going on on this thread:
Nonsense.
The current state of affairs is, as you acknowledge yourself, that - for just one example - QM theory is simplified by assuming strict determinism, however assumptions of free will are still possuible.
hey, listen, LiquidRage, you're getting on my nerves, especially with this last post of yours; don't assume you can simply preach at me, then use anti-theist agitprop to try to rhetorically smear me (as you did in a previous thread).
As a hardline atheist, and as one with not inconsequential scientific training, I find your evangelist dogmatism quite boring.
I suggest you discuss with me, since I won't hold with being simply preached at.
D'oh, you've been given reasons already by both Bill and me (previous thread), you just ignored them.
Emergent properties of complexity, I remind you, just for a start.

Hey, why don't you let me know when you're willing to drop the rhetoric and the fallacies of overbroad generalization and simplification, and we can resume our discussion, you and I ?
D'oh, d'oh, noooooooo, I never read posts I respond to, I simply pick words at random out of a barrel and toss them into a response.
Come back when you're willing to be logical.


You obviously just missed my entire point, made at the beginning of the thread we last encountered each other, and again in this thread.
I'm talking about what is popularly generally known as free will, which is an important point and diffference.

I'm not.
And this is irrelevent to my posts.
Read more carefully !

Moreover, once you look at the actual state of affairs in philosophy and science, you will discover quite a few definitions in usage that differ in subtle but significant ways.

[ June 23, 2002: Message edited by: Gurdur ]</p>