Excellent explanation of argument thank you. I have a class on it today, and was a little put off by its logical/propositional presentation in the text. Once again thanks great to listen to you. You have a nice voice, pace, and clear structure of thoughts.
This seems like a completely unreasonable criterion of free will. In this universe, you didn't; therefore, you couldn't have? No: in a counterfactual universe indistinguishable from ours up to the present -- in particular, in a universe in which you still count as you -- you did. There's nothing more than that, that free will could possibly be expected to require, and still count as free will. Any more stringent requirement is either simple nonsense or an ersatz "free will" concocted to prop up a prior commitment to incompatibilism.
That doesn't affect the argument in any way. If the possible world you're describing were, as you stated, indistinguishable from ours up to the present, then the laws of physics and the past movement of all particles would be identical. In that case, the present moment would be identical, as every moment is the direct result of the moment that immediately preceded it. So there is still no possible world indistinguishable from ours up to the present moment, in which you acted differently at the present moment. Any possible world must, as you say, be indistinguishable from ours up to the present, including the laws of physics and the movement of the particles. In that case, there isn't a difference between invoking possible worlds, or just using our own, as a possible world in which you don't perform identical actions in the present is actually impossible, and therefore not a possible world.
@@HGWells1 @HGWells1 If every cubic millimeter of the universe has the same temperature and pressure as they do in the real world, but all the locations of atoms are randomly reassigned within each cubic millimeter of gas or liquid that's not part of a human brain, that's indistinguishable. Everyone has the same memories, and the world is exactly the same in any way that would provide any evidence about the past. But the butterfly-effect stuff gets re-randomized both into the past and into the future. Into the past, it doesn't make any difference because otherwise it wouldn't have wound up indistinguishable. Into the future, the probability that it will make a difference is one, because there's no choose-the-counterfactual mechanism to stop it.
@@HGWells1A criterion of free will that demands that we can will acausally or have arbitrary preferences is nuts, though I suppose that's the most literal interpretation. "Freedom of the will" (F) is the freedom of preference/will from something (F->~X). If that something (P) is the set of laws (i.e. physics) that implies determinism (P -> D), then yeah, free will is not compatible with determinism given P, by definition (F -> ~P, P->D ⊢P->~F∧D). That's assuming physics implies determinism which is questionable at best but let's stick to this simplistic model for the sake of argument. I don't have a problem with that per se but I think it fails to be a satisfactory answer in the spirit of the question. The premise that "freedom" means freedom from the laws that govern everything else basically begs the question. Certain prerequisites have to be met before we can even sensibly consider what "freedom" and "will" are. For example, no one (modulo crackpots) thinks elementary particles or rocks have free will. Determinism, if true, has produced dynamic systems that have internal models of the world. Some of these systems have world models that also contain self-models of the system (humans are like this). They can produce "counterfactual universes" as hypothetical contexts for their self-model to see how they would've acted differently in different cirumstances. This is the "level" that free will makes sense on. When you're considering a counterfactual world, you're not usually positing that somewhere down the line there was a discrepancy in the laws of physics that explains the difference in the worlds. No, it's a hypothetical synchronic scenario/context, mutatis mutandis and ceteris paribus. Suppose I give you the option of choosing from two transparent boxes A and B: A contains $100 and B contains a lump of coal. You'd probably choose box A in any world that's even remotely like ours for reasons beyond "initial conditions of the universe + laws of physics". It's true that in a deterministic universe your choice ultimately reduces to some kind of fundamental interactions of matter (or whatever) and to a causal link from the beginning of time to the moment of "choice"; however, when you ("the system") are making the choice, the relevant information you consider doesn't include the initial conditions of the universe, or how the photons bouncing off the $$ hit your retnas and what the causal chain of events in your brain is after that. And though you can't arbitrarilly choose your preferences, and the process of you considering and weighing your choices is deterministic, it is such that the reasons you have for your choice are independent from anything that's irrelevant to your preferences and the context. And you can imagine different worlds with different contexts, where again, your reasons are independent of what is deemed irrelevant in the context and the consistency of your self-model is preserved across these hypotheticals in some sense. That's freedom of will in my opinion.
Excellent explanation of argument thank you. I have a class on it today, and was a little put off by its logical/propositional presentation in the text. Once again thanks great to listen to you. You have a nice voice, pace, and clear structure of thoughts.
Great video and awesome explanation
This seems like a completely unreasonable criterion of free will. In this universe, you didn't; therefore, you couldn't have? No: in a counterfactual universe indistinguishable from ours up to the present -- in particular, in a universe in which you still count as you -- you did. There's nothing more than that, that free will could possibly be expected to require, and still count as free will. Any more stringent requirement is either simple nonsense or an ersatz "free will" concocted to prop up a prior commitment to incompatibilism.
That doesn't affect the argument in any way. If the possible world you're describing were, as you stated, indistinguishable from ours up to the present, then the laws of physics and the past movement of all particles would be identical. In that case, the present moment would be identical, as every moment is the direct result of the moment that immediately preceded it. So there is still no possible world indistinguishable from ours up to the present moment, in which you acted differently at the present moment.
Any possible world must, as you say, be indistinguishable from ours up to the present, including the laws of physics and the movement of the particles. In that case, there isn't a difference between invoking possible worlds, or just using our own, as a possible world in which you don't perform identical actions in the present is actually impossible, and therefore not a possible world.
@@HGWells1 Indistinguishable doesn't mean atom-by-atom identical.
@@danwylie-sears1134If it didn't mean this, then how would it be indistinguishable from the past to the present?
@@HGWells1 @HGWells1 If every cubic millimeter of the universe has the same temperature and pressure as they do in the real world, but all the locations of atoms are randomly reassigned within each cubic millimeter of gas or liquid that's not part of a human brain, that's indistinguishable. Everyone has the same memories, and the world is exactly the same in any way that would provide any evidence about the past. But the butterfly-effect stuff gets re-randomized both into the past and into the future. Into the past, it doesn't make any difference because otherwise it wouldn't have wound up indistinguishable. Into the future, the probability that it will make a difference is one, because there's no choose-the-counterfactual mechanism to stop it.
@@HGWells1A criterion of free will that demands that we can will acausally or have arbitrary preferences is nuts, though I suppose that's the most literal interpretation. "Freedom of the will" (F) is the freedom of preference/will from something (F->~X). If that something (P) is the set of laws (i.e. physics) that implies determinism (P -> D), then yeah, free will is not compatible with determinism given P, by definition (F -> ~P, P->D ⊢P->~F∧D). That's assuming physics implies determinism which is questionable at best but let's stick to this simplistic model for the sake of argument. I don't have a problem with that per se but I think it fails to be a satisfactory answer in the spirit of the question. The premise that "freedom" means freedom from the laws that govern everything else basically begs the question. Certain prerequisites have to be met before we can even sensibly consider what "freedom" and "will" are. For example, no one (modulo crackpots) thinks elementary particles or rocks have free will. Determinism, if true, has produced dynamic systems that have internal models of the world. Some of these systems have world models that also contain self-models of the system (humans are like this). They can produce "counterfactual universes" as hypothetical contexts for their self-model to see how they would've acted differently in different cirumstances. This is the "level" that free will makes sense on. When you're considering a counterfactual world, you're not usually positing that somewhere down the line there was a discrepancy in the laws of physics that explains the difference in the worlds. No, it's a hypothetical synchronic scenario/context, mutatis mutandis and ceteris paribus. Suppose I give you the option of choosing from two transparent boxes A and B: A contains $100 and B contains a lump of coal. You'd probably choose box A in any world that's even remotely like ours for reasons beyond "initial conditions of the universe + laws of physics". It's true that in a deterministic universe your choice ultimately reduces to some kind of fundamental interactions of matter (or whatever) and to a causal link from the beginning of time to the moment of "choice"; however, when you ("the system") are making the choice, the relevant information you consider doesn't include the initial conditions of the universe, or how the photons bouncing off the $$ hit your retnas and what the causal chain of events in your brain is after that. And though you can't arbitrarilly choose your preferences, and the process of you considering and weighing your choices is deterministic, it is such that the reasons you have for your choice are independent from anything that's irrelevant to your preferences and the context. And you can imagine different worlds with different contexts, where again, your reasons are independent of what is deemed irrelevant in the context and the consistency of your self-model is preserved across these hypotheticals in some sense. That's freedom of will in my opinion.