According to Robert Sapolsky, human free will does not exist

[pood]

. The debate itself only started with people debating over whether God was justified in sending people to hell for doing things he knew they would do before he ever actually created them.

Right, so then God should not have created them. It does not follow that just because God knew in advance what they were going to do, they had to do it. Had they done something different, God would have known that thing instead.

 

[Jarhyn]

Hey Bruce. I would roundly disagree.

If I were to describe this in a way that should be recognizable in terms of "Newtonian sufficient determinism", "an object in motion freely continues to some location unless acted upon by outside forces."

Free will pertains to the discussion of objects which have some capability to turn some form of potential energy into motion by acting on the outside, and bringing these actions into the scope of "free continuation".

It does not in any way depend on not having an earlier cause, so much as the momentary change and what brings it about.

Now, this is completely independent of whether it is acted upon by such a force.

If you would like, I can break this down in the way that I feel it must be, but it will be very obtuse because I do not use language as most feel I ought.

 

[bilby]

As I see it, an agent can be said to have free will if it's actions are determined only by internal processes within the agent, whose outcome is unknowable to the agent until those processes are completed.

This can, of course, be argued to be not "true" free will, on the grounds that a hypothetical 'godlike' external agent could have simply skipped to the answer, and correctly predicted the action that would inevitably be taken; However, as no such entities exist, I see no particular reason to care what they would be able to predict if they did.

As observers embedded in a Minkowski block spacetime, we exist in a present epoch that has a chaotic, and consequently unpredictable despite being entirely unchangeable, future. Our only access to that future is to move as we must through time (and space); But as agents, we make a clear distinction between internal influences that lead to our future "I decided to take a walk", and external influences "but couldn't because the door was locked".

The I, that decided to take a walk, is the sum of all the billions of physical interactions that make up "me". That these interactions are deterministic, tells me nothing useful - the outcome may be fixed, but it is not known, so it is not unfree, and the decision is no less a part of "me" than are my hands or feet, liver or spleen.

If you cannot forecast what will happen, then what actually happens is freely chosen from all of the things that possibly could have been forecast to happen, even if only one of those things was "predetermined" to happen by physical laws acting in such complex and chaotic ways as to be inscrutable.

The past, like the future, is fixed; But that doesn't make counterfactual "alternate histories" impossible, or even useless, to speculate over. Indeed, such speculations might feed back into future decisions - so being a necessary and unavoidable part of reality at the present epoch.

To the extent that we perceive freedom, it is compatible with determinism.

To the extent that freedom is incompatible with determinism, determinism is useless - a brute fact that helps us with nothing at all, as it is imperceptible to us.

 

[Jarhyn]

'godlike' external agent could have simply skipped to the answer, and correctly predicted the action that would inevitably be taken

For the sake of argument I will wager this is not actually true.

If the 'godlike' external entity cannot project what would happen other than engaging a recalculation of the whole universe from the beginning and playing it forward to the present, they do not actually *predict* the action at all, but are merely describing it as they watch it happen for the first time.

It could very well be that the only way to know what happens, even for a god, is merely to watch what happens as it happens, and as such be incapable of making "predictions" at all, limited only to "dicton" without the "pre-".

At some point though, I will be forced to discuss Spectre tiles and aperiodic systems and the qualities we have observed that math allows within infinite aperiodic systems in general (and our universe seems to be an aperiodic system, or at least has many qualities of one).

 

[bilby]

'godlike' external agent could have simply skipped to the answer, and correctly predicted the action that would inevitably be taken

For the sake of argument I will wager this is not actually true.

If the 'godlike' external entity cannot project what would happen other than engaging a recalculation of the whole universe from the beginning and playing it forward to the present, they do not actually *predict* the action at all, but are merely describing it as they watch it happen for the first time.

It could very well be that the only way to know what happens, even for a god, is merely to watch what happens as it happens, and as such be incapable of making "predictions" at all, limited only to "dicton" without the "pre-".

In my mind, the godlike entity sits outside the block, and can simply decide to look at any part of that block. As the block itself is all of spacetime, no calculations are required; "God" just looks elsewhere, which in this case happens to be at what we think of as the future.

 

[Jarhyn]

'godlike' external agent could have simply skipped to the answer, and correctly predicted the action that would inevitably be taken

For the sake of argument I will wager this is not actually true.

If the 'godlike' external entity cannot project what would happen other than engaging a recalculation of the whole universe from the beginning and playing it forward to the present, they do not actually *predict* the action at all, but are merely describing it as they watch it happen for the first time.

It could very well be that the only way to know what happens, even for a god, is merely to watch what happens as it happens, and as such be incapable of making "predictions" at all, limited only to "dicton" without the "pre-".

In my mind, the godlike entity sits outside the block, and can simply decide to look at any part of that block. As the block itself is all of spacetime, no calculations are required; "God" just looks elsewhere, which in this case happens to be at what we think of as the future.

But the problem here is that that still isn't "predicting" it's "describing what is in front of you", and not only that, if the block is a *block*, that makes the Spectre problem even more apparent.

This is because, and I hate to point this out, we have proven that there are, under math, aperiodic systems that are *infinite* and of which there are an infinite number of sets of this that do not align with one another (and I will quote an email I got from one of the people who published a study on it):

There are uncountably many distinct tilings by hats ("distinct" in the sense that there's no single translation or rotation of the plane that will bring the two tilings into perfect coincidence everywhere -- some hats will always be a bit different).

* But hat tilings are "repetitive" -- any finite patch of tiles found in any hat tilings will appear infinitely often in all of them. So although there are lots of hat tilings that are *globally* different, *locally* they're indistinguishable from each other.

This is in regard to hats but Spectre has the same qualities.

Now, the point here is that, if the universe follows the rules for a multidimensional aperiodic tiling, it CAN very well have these features *and still be deterministic*.

Instead of seeing a finite patch of "tilings" as "just representing tiles" one must "think hard" and scale up the "finite" patch by quite a ridiculous amount and think of these smaller patches it contains as *particles* composed of some unitary *mono-particle* that forms this periodic set, a periodic table, defining the limited ways those come together and the relative frequency of their appearance in the tiling.

This lends sense to the idea of *parallel universes*, but not only of parallel universes but asking about the properties of those finite patches when they are seen, *and the adjoining rules of what may be seen around them*.

In fact, I would suggest thinking about such a variant or addition to Spectre that causes ALL the tiles to rotate in some way and then come back together into a different field in a deterministic and advancing way similar to the function of time.

If I were to name one of these finite patches "Bob" I could very sensibly say "what are the properties of "bob"?" Completely independently of the infinite numbers of "bob" I could find amid the tiling. Possibility about "bob" as a question then has nothing to do with any one place or time or even any single tiling you might find Bob in, though you are guaranteed to find Bob in all of them, and in infinite supply.

Those Bobs might be a very far distance apart, but you can even calculate the relative average frequency of Bob to some extent.

The second thing that may be said is that without an impossible way to reference where you are in such a field (which is impossible because the coordinate is infinite and cannot contain such precision on itself because of Godel incompleteness and the lack of zero property), and because there are infinite variations all containing all possible finite patches somewhere in them, once you have completely identified the shape of the finite patch that is "the whole universe up to now", you still don't know which infinite field or region you are in. It's an undecidable problem.

From here a deterministically built universe from an aperiodic tiling CAN have the feature where experience within it features that which IS truly random from the perspective of its denizens.

What it also unfortunately shows is that if you reach out and change tilings in this "block version" of a "much higher-dimensional aperiodic field", all you've done is look at a different field, and if there are different fields, you have ALREADY conceded that there is alternality, not merely to the left and right, but of the whole field.

The burden to prove alternality cannot exist is to prove that the universe does not have such features and this cannot be proven from within it, so we cannot prove alternality does not exist.

At best we can prove that these alternalities do not happen "in the same place and time", and that this itself is not a sensible request or concept as we have already shown that the math of aperiodic systems DOES allow the observation of *identical* patches not to "the inside" and "outside, as if one arranged the whole tilings in some way and searched among them for the result, but that you can search for these identical results to the left and right.

We know this is the case for such simple and small "patches" of "tilings" as are observed in our fundamental particles and periodic table of the elements, indicating frequencies and rarity of various "patches" among our framework.

Determinism does not prevent randomness because "*locally* they're indistinguishable from each other", and so one patch somewhere will experience in the next moment discovering their location is embedded in larger patch A and another will discover they are embedded in larger patch B, and so you can say "when patch P experiences A vs B, what is the difference in outcome in resulting patch P2A and P2B? How does P transform after interacting with context A vs context B?

And now you are considering possbilities despite the whole action of all such fields as "deterministic".

 

[Jarhyn]

@BSilvEsq I have now at long length discussed what mode of consideration is made when invoking "possibility" into a sentence with can, with respect to some particle "bob", both in the linguistic and physical sense.

Whenever a compatibilist utters the word "can" or "could" or any such invocation of possibility occurs, it is linguistically invoking the sense of "Bob, as a particle, insofar as what occurs with a Bob as a transformation 'over time', given different wider contexts."

Regardless of whether you wish to try to constrain that (arbitrarily, I might add) to some bob-in-finite-light-cone-path sense of Bob, a whole universe around the Bob, or whether you wish to invoke "Bob, independent of the light cone patch". Both allow valid consideration in terms of "possibility" and notably this exposes a mathematical error in the very statement "he couldn't because he didn't".

Namely this would indicate "the qualities of the particle 'bob' are such that Bob never transforms over X or fewer steps to Bobby, because Bob-in-context-at-coordinate did not".

This violates the basic rules of implications, because one member of a set cannot alone be used to ascertain the properties of the set; you need to have some truth held over all members of the set to do so.

This is the basic issue when one says "I couldn't because I didn't", insofar as they are simply saying nonsense; bobparticle type) is not limited by Bobat coordinate in an infinite field with an arbitrary zero property)

 

[Jarhyn]

Now that I have laid down what I personally mean when I say "can", and what I assert anyone expressing "ability" is ultimately trying to express whether they understand it so well or not, I will go further into the foundation of what I as a compatibilist see these terms as being capable of expressing with regards to the idea of "free will".

First, this allows me to express my freedoms, namely the set of way I will transform given various different contexts over time, as a particle type.

In fact, it also allows me to calculate, as a part and member of this field, a projection of another field that is simplified, and a particle that somehow has "similar properties" as the bigger one, but which may be handled even within a much smaller "patch".

In fact, one could understand then that the "bob-ness" of a particle may not even comport to the specific configuration of its "tiles" but some property shared about some non-contiguous patch, or even the presence of some larger trend within a group.

I could say, things at both of these scales similarly share bob-property.

Now Bob might be able to produce a smaller Bob inside itself, simpler but sharing some vital property that defined the Bob meta-particle.

It can present that other Bob instance inside itself with a context so as to test what "bob" could do, If Bob didn't know what Bob wanted to do".

As long as the model is correct, Bigger Bob already knows what Bob could do, because he had and measured a Bob actually in that state. And then Bigger Bob is of the sort that they know they could, but perhaps thinks now about whether they should... And whether Bob defines "a thing that thinks it should" is major business in the discussion of responsibility.