What is left for free will?

Originally posted by black beetle
Methinks the outside inputs are all forcefully or freely evaluated by the mind; it seems to me that the decision making system which brings up decisions either by force (not according to the free will of the decision maker) or freely (according to the free will of the decision maker), does not stand above the free will of the decision maker. If it was s ...[text shortened]... wo all the decisions of all the persons under the very same circumstances would be identical
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when the outside inputs are being 'freely evaluated' do you envisage that system used can take a fixed set of inputs and reach different outputs each time the system is run? or will a fixed set of inputs always conclude with the same outputs?

Originally posted by stellspalfie
[b]I think most of the time we would choose the same choice.

the key point here is if we make the same decision 'all' the time or 'most' of the time. if the answer is 'all' then we have no freewill. if the answer is 'most' of the time then we need to explain why. if we rewind the guy in the room (we can give him more buttons if you want to give h ...[text shortened]... can never deviate from the path we are on. therefore we have no freedom, we never really choose.[/b]

You must be one of those routine guys that eats the same meals over and over and never chooses any variety in his life.

Originally posted by RJHinds
You must be one of those routine guys that eats the same meals over and over and never chooses any variety in his life.

why?

Originally posted by stellspalfie
if a fixed set of inputs always had the same output, could we call that a decision or choice?

Once again I will ask you to define 'decision'/'choice'.

a decision to me would imply there are several outputs to select from, but that only creates another set of inputs to be narrowed down until there is one output.
Prior to the inputs being known, there are several possible outputs. Once the inputs are known, it may determine the output. That is still a decision/choice by my understanding of the word.
I think you are not only claiming the non-existence of free will, but also the non-existence of decisions/choices. But I think the problem is that your definition of 'decision'/'choice' is incoherent.
You want there to be several outputs for any given input, but you don't want to think about the mechanism that gets you from the inputs to a particular output. There are in fact only three possibilities:
1. A totally deterministic system whereby a given input will always give the same output.
2. A totally random system whereby a given input will have no effect on the output.
3. A mixture of determinism and randomness where the output is statistically dependent on the input, but not completely predictable.
You seem to be imagining a fourth possibility:
4. A system that takes inputs and produces outputs, but is not 1, 2 or 3.
But so far, that is all you have told us about it.
Then you call 4. 'free will', then you say 4. can't exist.
I agree, 4. can't exist. I disagree that 4. should be labelled 'free will'.

Originally posted by twhitehead
However, as far as I know, all laws of physics work both ways.

And?

In my sequence of mathematical operations the operations can be done in reverse.
That doesn't change the fact that the current state of the system is only dependent
on the operations that have been done and not on the operations that might be done
in the future.

Originally posted by googlefudge
And?

In my sequence of mathematical operations the operations can be done in reverse.
That doesn't change the fact that the current state of the system is only dependent
on the operations that have been done and not on the operations that might be done
in the future.

Not all mathematical operations can be done in reverse. If they could, then the the state of the system would be dependent on the operations you do in the future.

I must point out that in physics, we can neither predict the future nor the past exactly. The past is much more predictable, but that does not mean that it is perfectly predictable, nor that the future is totally unpredictable.

Originally posted by stellspalfie
when the outside inputs are being 'freely evaluated' do you envisage that system used can take a fixed set of inputs and reach different outputs each time the system is run? or will a fixed set of inputs always conclude with the same outputs?

Methinks we merely look consciously and/ or subconsciously, and also instinctively, the whole structural interconnection of the thing before the activation of our decision making system. All our knowledge, our desires and the products of all of our personal and collective intellectual efforts are a hard struggle to see, understand and decode the connections of the hierarchies, and we do it by means of making decisions. Also, we always have the option to choose not to choose. For example, we are always free to attribute to a bit the value “0” or “1” or “0/1” according to the evaluation of our mind, whilst choosing at last just one option amongst them doesn’t mean we are or were really forced to make that specific choice; under other circumstances, we could choose differently –from the decision “0/1” we can later start evaluations in order to attribute in the future to the bit the value “0” or “1”. In this case, all the input data would be identical as previously. What changed? Just our knowledge and hence the evaluation of the mind.

Another case is a specific position that has to be analyzed by a chess player; everybody sees the same position, but the stronger players see more and more. So, if we just conceive that every condition we have to analyze (and make decisions accordingly in order to move on) is in fact knowledge-dependent within a huge perfect information nexus, the free will standard holds. All we have to do is hard work in order to turn each decision making sub-field into a perfect information position
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Originally posted by googlefudge
And?

In my sequence of mathematical operations the operations can be done in reverse.
That doesn't change the fact that the current state of the system is only dependent
on the operations that have been done and not on the operations that might be done
in the future.

Yes, we drop a bottle and it breaks –time irreversible, however all the laws of physics show that there does not seem to be any distinction between the past and the future. Feynman amongst else stated perfectly well what we get when we have a sun and a planet, and start the planet off in some direction, going around the sun, and then we take a moving picture and run the moving picture backwards and observe it: the planet goes around the sun the opposite way and keeps on going around in an ellipse. The speed of the planet is such that the area swept out by the radius is always the same in equal times. In fact it just goes exactly the way it ought to go, in other words it cannot be distinguished from going the other way.
Also, the velocity changes as a result of the forces. Reverse the time, and see how the forces are not changed –hence the changes in velocity are not altered at corresponding distances. So then each velocity has a succession of alterations made in exactly the reverse of the way that they were made before. Therefore in the law of gravitation the direction of the time makes no difference.

Other cases in which the time is reversible are the law of electricity and magnetism and the laws of nuclear interaction
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Originally posted by twhitehead
Not all mathematical operations can be done in reverse. If they could, then the the state of the system [b]would be dependent on the operations you do in the future.

I must point out that in physics, we can neither predict the future nor the past exactly. The past is much more predictable, but that does not mean that it is perfectly predictable, nor that the future is totally unpredictable.[/b]

Sorry I should have clarified that my sequence was for simplicities sake made
only of simple reversible operations. My bad.

However, it's still not true [or not demonstrated] that my system has any dependence
on it's future states.

In my system, simple mathematical operations are selected by a random selector with
a probability distribution based on the systems current state.
And note this is not seemingly random, it's random at base.

The current state of the system is the product of a chain of operations performed on
the initial conditions.
The future of the system is as yet undefined as the next operation is not yet selected.
Also, this system only has it's present state, neither the past or the future actually exist.
There is no direction in this system, there is just the current state and a random
operation that changes the state.

Also I know that in physics neither the future or the past is completely predictable or
unpredictable... What made you think I didn't know that?

Originally posted by black beetle
Yes, we drop a bottle and it breaks –time irreversible, however all the laws of physics show that there does not seem to be any distinction between the past and the future. Feynman amongst else stated perfectly well what we get when we have a sun and a planet, and start the planet off in some direction, going around the sun, and then we take a moving pi ...[text shortened]... e is reversible are the law of electricity and magnetism and the laws of nuclear interaction
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Who says time exists to be 'reversed'?

Velocity is a physical property, the object is going in a certain physical direction.
Mathematically you can 'just' reverse the direction and run time backwards but
I would like to see you do it in reality.

The map is not the territory.

If you do a simple trajectory calculation for a cannon ball fired from a cannon
sitting on an infinite flat plane the equation gives 2 solutions for the points
where the cannon ball hits the plane.

One is in front of the cannon where you expect it, the other is behind the cannon.

This is because the path of the cannon ball is a parabola and the mathematical
parabola will pass through the plane twice.

However only one of those solutions is actually physical.


I don't really care if you can show mathematically that you can just reverse time in an
equation. If you can't actually do it in reality then it's not physical.


There are plenty of current models of physics that do not have time in them.

The universe just has it's present ever changing state...


A good analogy would be evolution.

Evolution has no 'direction'. You just have the current species constantly adapting to
their environment. We can look at the changes and see a change in environment undo
the changes made by the last environment. for example there is a species of moth in
London which has a white and a dark variant, the dark variant became much more common
due to pollution and soot making the surfaces it sat on darker and thus making the white ones
easy to spot by predators. New pollution controls have reduced the pollution, cleaned
the habitat, and now white ones are becoming more common again. We see this as a reversal
but neither time nor evolution is running backwards.


If you want to tell me you can just run time backwards you have to demonstrate that it exists
in the first place and then that it can be reversed. And being able to run the maths backwards
doesn't do that.

Until then you need to make arguments that don't rely on this unproven premise.

Originally posted by googlefudge
Who says time exists to be 'reversed'?

Velocity is a physical property, the object is going in a certain physical direction.
Mathematically you can 'just' reverse the direction and run time backwards but
I would like to see you do it in reality.

The map is not the territory.

If you do a simple trajectory calculation for a cannon ball fired fr ...[text shortened]... sn't do that.

Until then you need to make arguments that don't rely on this unproven premise.

Now all we need to be up-to-date is a fairy tale in which a kiss turns a prince into a frog.

Originally posted by black beetle
Yes, we drop a bottle and it breaks –time irreversible, however all the laws of physics show that there does not seem to be any distinction between the past and the future. Feynman amongst else stated perfectly well what we get when we have a sun and a planet, and start the planet off in some direction, going around the sun, and then we take a moving pi ...[text shortened]... e is reversible are the law of electricity and magnetism and the laws of nuclear interaction
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I'm trying to bring in the idea of block universe determinism for a brief consideration, and your post seems like the best place.

All this talk about determinism implies that an event or state of affairs is "determined" by something else. One "something else" is a decision, and then the debate is whether decisions are determined, and if so, by what?

An earlier post of yours indicates a belief that the past has no priority over the present and future in deterministic power.

This premise does not lead me toward thinking that events are determined by other events. It leads me think of a world where every aspect, past, present, and future, is set in itself and not as the result of other aspects. So the 4-D universe is a set of instances of "that which is the case" spread over that space-time, none of them "making" any other instance the way it is. This is the block universe. Is it deterministic? Not in the sense that anything influences anything else in it, but it is deterministic in the sense that nothing in it can or does influence anything else in it. This idea is far more radical than the usual flavors of determinism, and I think it needs to be covered in any thorough discussion.

Originally posted by googlefudge
Who says time exists to be 'reversed'?

Velocity is a physical property, the object is going in a certain physical direction.
Mathematically you can 'just' reverse the direction and run time backwards but
I would like to see you do it in reality.

The map is not the territory.

If you do a simple trajectory calculation for a cannon ball fired fr ...[text shortened]... sn't do that.

Until then you need to make arguments that don't rely on this unproven premise.

Methinks it would be good to read for starters again my first post at the 2nd page of this thread. I never said that "I can run time backwards". I said clearly that "if we are to accept that earlier states of the universe can be seen as fixing all later states, then equally, later states can be seen as fixing all earlier states.", and then I asked stellspalfie what, in his opinion, exact agent is ontologically special about the past, as opposed to the present and the future. And I 'm asking you: What arguments of mine rely on an unproven premise?

Back to your post to which I reply herenow:
For one, since Classical Physics deals solely with deterministic systems whose past, present, and future are totally contained in a single timeless equation, for such systems time does not exist except as spatial increments marking the various aspects of a static pattern. This is the reason why moving one way or another on a static pattern does not change it, hence the laws of Classical Physics hold true regardless of whether the time variable is positive or negative. Therefore, due to the fact that time is not an intrinsic part of deterministic systems, Classical Physics (and the example you offered) has nothing valid to say about the Real Nature of Time.

For two, Thermodynamics claim that time is irreversible simply because it is forced to ignore this level of precision where reversibility resides due to the overwhelming complexity in keeping track of every deterministic molecule. The illusion of the so called time irreversibility in Thermodynamics is grounded on its inability to calculate a system with absolute precision, which prevents it from mathematically confirming time symmetry, and that its laws are based on incomplete statistical observations and assumptions.
Time symmetry or reversibility requires that the laws of a system in question do not change when time is reversed. In Classical Physics we can check such a thing easily due to the fact that both the past and the future of a system can be calculated with sharp precision. However, since Thermodynamics cannot completely know the total characteristics of a system, the extreme complexity leads to an inability to conduct comparisons between the forward and reversed systems in order to check out for symmetry. Therefore, over here Thermodynamics is also inconclusive about the nature of time. However, if we knew all the characteristics in detail, we could see that the future is as certain as the past and that time in that case is reversible! Furthermore, the fact that science cannot determine the future state of a system does not mean that the system is nondeterministic.
It follows that solely the nondeterministic systems are time irreversible, for time cannot be symmetric in systems whose future is not already contained in an equation connecting it with the past. And the quantum processes are by nature nondetermistic, since the state of a wave function that collapses into another cannot be predicted mathematically. Mind you, the unpredictability of a quantum system is not rooted on an observer’s perception, but on the intrinsically nondeterministic nature of the system itself. In fact the time arise by consciousness sequentially choosing which aspects of quantum wave functions to manifest as physical experience, and the choice is nondeterministic, otherwise it would already be pre-decided, leaving no choice. Choice implies by force SDIC/ free will, and this means that the irreversibility of time ultimately stems from the nature of the free will, which is neither easily predictable nor easily undoable
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Originally posted by JS357
I'm trying to bring in the idea of block universe determinism for a brief consideration, and your post seems like the best place.

All this talk about determinism implies that an event or state of affairs is "determined" by something else. One "something else" is a decision, and then the debate is whether decisions are determined, and if so, by what?

An e ...[text shortened]... the usual flavors of determinism, and I think it needs to be covered in any thorough discussion.

Quite interesting, as almost all of your ideas. I am extremely time poor right now, but I will think about this specific set-up and I will try to come back
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Originally posted by black beetle
Quite interesting, as almost all of your ideas. I am extremely time poor right now, but I will think about this specific set-up and I will try to come back
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If interested, there is some elucidation of what I mean to say, at:

http://www.ipod.org.uk/reality/reality_block_universe.asp