What is Determinism? (Free Will)
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- čas přidán 6. 03. 2021
- An explanation of the metaphysical position of determinism with respect to free will, which claims that the universe is deterministic. This is the broad definition of determinism which includes both hard and soft determinism (or compatibilism).
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(Waterfall drops.)
6:00 Issues with Libertarianists' Quantum argument:
1.That we have theories explaining the quants deterministically, and we have no proof of them being wrong. (Well that is a double-edged blade, because neither has "quantum positions and velocities exist, we just can't measure them" been proven.)
2.(9:40) "It hasn't been shown that indeterminate states of quants contribute to free will." Well, just as above, it also hasn't been shown otherwise.
3.Ok, an interesting point raised, is that "if there are choices indeed completely independent from the chooser's biological reasons, upbringing, or anything else, then they are random, and our position in life can be atteibuted only to luck".
To this I reply, that the independence of a choice may not necessarily mean it is random, but maybe it is the consciousness, the I, that makes that decision.
So what does the conscioisness make decisions based upon? We cannot know for sure, but let me propose this:
We make (independent) decisions based on laziness. In some cases, there are causal arguments for taking action, and causal arguments for withholding it. Withholding is easier, acting is harder. What if it is the consciousness that has a say in those cases? What if our mystical consciousness, the true us that we cannot understand, but can feel, decides? And when you stand there, wondering whether you should approach that girl or not, it is your consciousness deciding the course of the universe?
I agree that causal effects can influence the decision-making, rendering the consciousness more inclined to pick one option over the other, but it always has a choice.
Why do I think so? There is no proof nor disproof of it, but I FEEL like that is the truth, I FEEL my consciousness making decisions. And we base our axiomatic systems on nothing other than intuition after all.
Beautifully done Carneades!! Loved it!
Thanks! And thanks for watching!
Anxiously awaiting the next video.
First off, you do an amazing job at breaking down complex ideas for us laymen to understand. I'm taken aback that you don't have more subs and views. So many people are missing out on some good knowledge.
I lean heavily towards hard determinism. If you haven't already made the video for hard determinism, I respecfully would like to suggest the incorporation of nihilism in it. I'm sure you know the relevance. If not, cool, just a thought.
Hello dear body ,I also lean towards causal determinism matched with a little human's free willed choices. The life is blend of causally determined happenings and states and our own behaviour towards them which is stemming from our free will ,but many a times swayed by all these causally determined happenings and states near us.
Hey Carneades! Love your videos, just a heads-up (totally unrelated to topic), IF I remember correctly and IF my biology teacher was correct back in the day, currents in the brain are not causes by moving electrons, like an electric current. They are caused by the chain-reaction of expulsion from the neuron of a certain molecule (can't remember which one). But according to the teaching I had, It's not an electric current. You can still call it a current though! You might have made that pedagogical choice though, which is okay too!
Sorry about the long text, keep up the awesome work! (Insert a 5G brain control joke here) :)
Cheers!
Free will isn't a matter of whether you have it or not - it's a spectrum.
- If every action you take has been determined since the beginning of time you effectively have no free will.
- If let's say a random event happens every 1 million years - there is some free will to existence but barely.
- If a random event happens every second, your future from your inception is not determined it can only be estimated.
- If everything is completely random constantly, you cannot exist and it is raw chaos.
The only entities that truly have absolute and true free will exist beyond logic and the very concept of free will and causality. In other words, God and any entities greater.
We are not imbued with free will, contrary to what the Bible proposes.
Edit: After some thought, we could in fact have free will if the concept itself chooses to exist or not - meaning every concept was given a choice.
If the concept itself chooses to choose to exist, then it will - if not, it won't. If they choose to choose something else, or don't choose at all - fine, that is as it is. You might say that it's future will decide it's answer, but why assume that the concept is bound by time and logic?
In other words, we are us, we are the universe, we are god, we are the choice, we are everything, and we are nothing, and we chose to exist, we aren't us, we aren't the universe, we aren't god, we never chose, we aren't the choice, we aren't everything, and we aren't nothing, we chose to choose or not. We are every other option, and non-option and we simultaneously are none of it and beyond it and below it.
Ultimately nothing and everything lead us to this decision and our future is determined and the outcome is random and continues to be random.
This "choice" probably exists beyond concepts and below concepts to everything and nothing. The grandiosity here is unfathomable and exists outside of logic. But for us, this concept or thing or whatever it is has chosen this path - and we are part of it, and we chose this, we chose to be determined, we chose to undertake logic, we chose to be as we are. We have both free will and we don't, and we cannot fathom why or why not.
Philosophy, logic, science and reasoning cannot give us the ultimate answers. We cannot likely through any mechanism get the answers - and we chose to have it that way.
To quote myself from your previous video: “The weakness of political libertarianism is that it views organization as inherently authoritarian and so libertarians never organize any movements to speak of. And though political and metaphysical libertarianism seem only superficially related, it is easy to assume people have both libertarian politics and libertarian metaphysics, at least if you ignore the part about the laws of physics. As for the laws of physics, they determine what an agent can or cannot do but not really what an agent does or doesn’t do when the agent can do it. Even deterministic laws tend to be contingent though, so things often happen otherwise than we may assume.” Deterministic laws tend to be contingent because they prescribe what should happen, describe what happens or frame a construction of what can happen in a given case. If it is easy to assume people have both libertarian politics and libertarian metaphysics, it is conversely easy to assume people have both non-libertarian politics and (hard) deterministic metaphysics. Specifically, it is easy to assume people have both authoritarian politics and deterministic metaphysics or democratic politics and compatiblistic metaphysics.
Did my comment about quantum physics get deleted somehow?
Since no explanation has been forthcoming, I guess I'll just retype the comment again, from memory: it is not the case that particles-as-waves have a uncertain position while particles-as-particles have uncertain momentum, as you claim. Waves of any form, even macroscopic ocean surface waves, have position-momentum uncertainty; this is not a specifically quantum phenomenon, other than saying "all particles are waves". (I linked to another video about this in my first post; maybe that's why it got deleted? Search for "sixty symbols uncertainty principle").
You need to sample many wave crests to accurately determine wavelength (which is what momentum is in quantum physics), so the more accurately you measure wavelength, the more spread-out a position you have to be accounting for, and so the less well-measured the position. Conversely, the more accurately you measure the position, the fewer crests you can sample, and the less accurately you can measure wavelength. This is even true of e.g. a guitar note, the example used in the aforementioned video: a short chug on a guitar has a broader frequency spectrum but a more specific time it happens at, while a long note has a more specific frequency but is spread out over time.
Where the "quantum" part and wave-particle duality comes in is that macroscopic waves are continuous, and can come in any frequency, while quantum waves can only exist as integer numbers of wave crests that are themselves integer multiples of the shortest possible wavelength. It's that discreteness that makes them particle-like.
The oast one, how reasons influence our free choice, I think is explained by existentialism. Choice is a phenomenon, an experience. We choose an action, and we choose the reasons for that action. In that sense, we are creating the causes for our actions by telling a story of our actions and from that perspective there is more free will than we may think, not just that we can choose to steal bread to feed a starving family, but that we choose that narrative as well.
I wonder if any ism is good or evil and limited by each written and spoken language depending on version or individual interpretations of said limited languages 🤔
Wait, is this a re-upload?
I watched your videos on Pyhrronian skepticism you say you adopt a form of pyrrhonian sceptism the argument for pyrrhonian scepticism can be equally used to defend epistemic Relativism what do you think about that?
Hmm. There's a distinction to be made between the arguments of Pyrrhonian skepticism and the position of Pyrrhonian skepticism. The arguments can be used to attack any specific epistemic claim, but the overall position would be skeptical of the justification for epistemic relativism, i.e. how do you justify the claim that specific claims are relatively true. The IEP has a great comparison of skepticism and epistemic relativism. iep.utm.edu/skepanci/#SSH3civ
I submit that "free will" is what we call a decision at the intersection of (a) who we are and (b) the environment we're in.
Yes, i think a good analogy is a "class" in computer software development languages. A decision may be called 'free' when the outcome is dependent on the properties of a specific instance of a class, rather than solely dependent on properties of the class itself.
Worth noting that compatibilism and soft determinism are not coextensive; the latter is a subset of the former. You can be a compatibilist and also think that there is true randomness in the world; you would just think that that randomness is not related to free will, and that if there was not that randomness then free will would be no worse off.
(This would be me. From a certain impossibly objective perspective even quantum mechanics may be deterministic, but from any possible subjective perspective there is effective randomness in the universe, according to our best understanding of it today. Nevertheless, that does nothing at all to help free will, and in fact would only hurt it if its effects were more pronounced; it is only because on a macroscopic scale we are *sufficiently* determined that our brains are able to reliably carry out the functionality that constitutes free will, which on my account is largely synonymous with moral judgement: the ability to examine one's own desires and desire that they be like this or like that, possibly instead of how they actually are, and for those second-order desires to be causally effective in changing which of our first-order desires prevails in directing our behavior. Ala Frankfurt, or Wolf.)
Like in your Libertarianism video where I also commented, you misunderstand the Libertarian's applications of quantum physics in these philosophical questions. What a Libertarian would argue has very little to do with the measurability of particles. It's based on hidden local variables which according to Bell's Theorem, either do not exist or are not local. If they don't exist, which is more likely and more widely accepted, then determinism is not how the universe works.
Well but that doesn't actually speak in favor of Libertarianism at all. If some microparticles behave randomly, that doesn't give you any more agency in the decisions you're making. The world might not be 100% deterministic but you still don't have any more agency, since physics behaving in a random way is no more under you agency than if physics behaves randomly.
@Eleftherios Epikuridis Hi again. I've got another counter to your argument. This one comes from philosopher John Searle, and you can see him explain it yourself in a video called "Philosophy of Free Will" or something like that. Just search John Searle and the title here on CZcams and it should come up. Anyways, I'll summarize it for you:
He basically states that this kind of argument (the one you just made) is commiting the fallacy of composition. There are many instances in which something that is made out of basic elements inherit properties from said elements without inheriting all properties from the same elements or sometimes give rise to new properties.
As an example: atoms are not individually wet, water is made of nothing but atoms so water cannot be wet. Is something like the argument you made.
In the case of consciousness, it would have to be the case that the mind inherits the parts of
quantum physics that give rise to indeterminacy without inheriting the parts that give rise to randomness, thereby laying the groundwork for a conceivable framework for free will.
Again, I will say that my only goal is to try to show that a libertarian perspective of the will is worth consideration and that it shouldn't be dismissed entirely as people tend to do.
@@hessylaguna5415 That's actually a pretty interesting Argument, and I'd say the argument of composition is true, in so far that single atoms are not concious, a mind is though. But it makes no sense that a brain should suddenly not be subject to causual chains, just because Atoms on a micro level behave probabilistically. No matter whether physical processes are deterministic or probabilistic, in both cases you have no agency over what is happening.
@Eleftherios Epikuridis I'm going to respond line by line. First, you recognized where the fallacy was, you even gave a good example with the conscious atoms which is awesome.
Next you say that just because atoms behave indeterminately does not mean that the brain can, even though the brain is made of these atoms. I ask then, why not? What doesn't make sense? Why could the brain not inherit the indeterminacy of these atoms?
Then you basically just re-stated the same argument again with the same fallacy as before even though you recognized it earlier.
Given my previous example here's how it reads as:
"No matter whether the molecule is made from oxygen or hydrogen, with both atoms you still don't get a liquid"
So it feels like you both understand and misunderstand what I was trying to say and I don't know whats confusing you.
@@eleftheriosepikuridis9110 Well, the quantum argument is not meant to prove free will itself, but disprove determinism. If the universe is not deterministic, it opens the possibility of free will.
A basic thing that determinism can't prove is: Does the world I know go on after I die? Did it exist before I was born (or I start remembering) If this can't be proven to me there is a form of free will. Since the only world I expierience is the world I KNOW. This world is different from every other world of every human beeing. So I can only be determined within my borders and the sensory I have available. This world is a free will within compared to the other world of every human or the bigger objective world.
Interesting claim. Are you saying that the reason we can't know that determinism is true is because it is possible that we are not determined before birth or after death? If so, it is a view with a high metaphysical burden to bear. It might address some of determinism's concerns about physicalism, but it will still have to address the issues of the principle of sufficient reason etc. that plague libertarianism, not to mention proving life before and after death.
All of that said, from the epistemic standpoint this weakens the case for determinism, which would bear the burden of showing that all life is like the one we live now or weaken the claim to be that only during our life is everything determined.
@@CarneadesOfCyrene My angle would be not exactly that one, though it would be an interesting one. I try to be more precise. Sorry I didn't make myself understood well enough before.
The first issue I have with Determinism is that it basically deny itsself. Basically it might be possible to measure every matter in every energystate. Therefore it is possible that we can know every state before and afterwards (if we have a complet set of rules that this matter follows, hece the laws of nature applying) just by detuction/applying the rules to the current known state. But if I know the state right now (and therefor every state afterwards) I know what follows. As soon as I know what follows I must be able to change those future states by acting differently until then. Now me acting differently is is either included in my pediction for the future state - but then - since I know this now - I must be able to act differently again. Which then again be included in my deterministic prediction, which should also be known and so on. This basically goes to infinity - the deterministic laws get into an loop of infinity. Or there immediately is a second future state. But the deterministic law can't accept 2 determined futures at the same time.
Still determinism MUST hold true to a certain point for the laws of nature working. This is where my first post about perception comes into play. And I'd be more than happy to make this more clear as well... but I am not a native speaker so I am not sure if I can translate everything as well as I would like to. Therefor I would love to ask if I have been able to detail my first issue in an understandable matter.
Many people have made the assumption that it is the outcome of fate to make it seem as though freewill exists. But what about the idea that fate appearing to exist is simply the outcome of greater freewill?
Fate can only be recognized after it's done.
Some people pretend to be able to see the accurate future, but really we can't.
Determinism is directly connected to the chain of causality.
The arguments I've read against free will assume that determinism exists in its stead. But the problem is that their disproof of free will is actually a disproof of the legitimacy of philosophical individuation, but they never touch on it. Essentially, they attempt to prove that all distinction is ultimately made arbitrarily. Ergo, distinguishing a self-caused (or uncaused) causal system understood as a free-willed human being from the rest of the causality of the universe is faulty. Instead, it's all deterministic. However, this criticism of philosophical individuation doesn't stop at the human being but applies to all distinction and all causal systems.
So the identity of 'toaster' is ultimately arbitrary as well as literally all things. Simply, there is no absolute rule as to why we distinguish any part of the universe from itself. Thus the supposed free will of the human being isn't any more legitimate than the supposed boundaries we create around the partition of the universe which we then label 'toaster'. So the human being is as uncaused as the toaster is. Furthermore, there is no distinction between cause and effect that isn't ultimately arbitrary too. So then determinism doesn't exist instead of free will because this argument against free will also destroys the concept of determinism by invalidating any distinction made between cause and effect and so nullifying the concept of causation.
So what do we call someone who believes in free will and determinism because they believe that they're both a product of philosophical individuation? And while they aren't compatible with each other the process which informs either perspective is the same and cannot be used to disprove itself; so they're forced to exist in contradiction.
Well I mean really a toaster as an individual thing does not exist, and neither do you. This is a perfectly reasonable position to hold, why try to someohow insert the idea of individual toasters and free wills into that? Sure it might not be as handy of a worldview as believing in toasters and free will but really that's not the goal of metaphysics...
Love your videos. Alas, an error. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle means that the assertion that an electron has a position and momentum is meaningless. It does not mean that it *actually* has a simultaneous position and momentum and we just can't observe it. It means that both cannot be known simultaneously. And that's not because of size or whatever, it's a fundamental law of physical nature. It would be akin to saying that somewhere "out there" there are round squares.
Thanks, but I think you are incorrect. Heisenberg assumed (unjustifiably) that measurement = meaning, in other words if you cannot measure some X, then that X is meaningless. Here's the SEP:
"he adopted an operational assumption: terms like “the position of a particle” have meaning only if one specifies a suitable experiment by which “the position of a particle” can be measured. We will call this assumption the “measurement=meaning principle”."
It is the act of measuring that causes us to not be able to determine the momentum and position, not an actual fact that it lacks both properties. In fact Heisenberg himself admits as much saying that the position and velocity can be calculated in the past. Here's the SEP quoting Heisenberg:
"A solution to this problem can again be found in the Chicago Lectures. Heisenberg admits that position and momentum can be known exactly. He writes:
'If the velocity of the electron is at first known, and the position then exactly measured, the position of the electron for times previous to the position measurement may be calculated. For these past times, δpδq is smaller than the usual bound.' "
Furthermore, clearly the measurement=meaning assumption appears false. We cannot measure the number of organisms that were alive exactly 1,000 years ago, but that does not mean that the concept is nonsense. Just because you cannot measure something does not mean it does not exist.
@@CarneadesOfCyrene Yes, I've noticed that the Copenhagen interpretation has gone out of vogue. And I see where you're coming from. But I think that that's not the correct interpretation of the theory, because it seems to imply almost a Kantian "noumenal vs phenomenal" (or however it's spelled) view of physics. Bohr and his followers held that when we say "position and momentum" we're projecting a priori assumptions upon physical reality, and quanta don't adhere to those.
Oh! And I should mention that yes, the position and momentum of a particle IN THE PAST can be known, yes. But not "now".
I really hope I'm not being "that guy" here, but I should clarify what I'm saying.
Okay. Yes. You can say what the position and momentum of a particle was in the past, but that cannot be used to PREDICT where it's at and how it's moving right now.
And that's not because of measurement. It's due to the wave/particle problem. That's how electrons and protons and such "tunnel". There's a measurable probability they could be either here, on the Moon, or across a solid wall, right after you figured out they were right in front of you a minute ago.
THAT'S what I'm saying. Quantum theory is indeterminate in that elementary particles aren't billiard balls, nor are they ocean waves either. And no amount of precise or even superhuman measurements can change that
Excellent video. Btw, this reminded me of a new channel called “Friendly Philosophy”. Worth checking out.
The universe is probabilistic. This can be seen in quantum chemistry and quantum biochemistry in the atomic and molecular orbital theory that shows electrons are located around atoms or molecules in probabilistic orbitals that show the likeliness of an electron to be located anywhere. This relates directly to chemical reactions by influencing the probability of any reaction taking place based upon the probability of the location of the electron, the state it is in, the orientation of the orbital etc which are all probabilistic. And life is just a bunch of chemical reactions, including all processes like thoughts and feelings etc. Normally in a lab the effects are small and not noticeable due to the large numbers of molecules taking part in any reaction, just one gram of water has somewhere around 10^22 molecules of water in it. But in a cell like a neuron the number of atoms is much less and so these quantum probability effects actually become important. Time also plays an important role as in the lab several minutes or even hours are not unusual to measure reaction times. But in enzymatic catalytic reactions in cells, a second might as well be a million years. Probability is driven by the number of potential incidents which increases with time as well as with interactions. This also relates back to Entropy, which is also probabilistic, but that is a story for another day.
Yes but quantum particles behaving in a probabilistic instead of a determinstic fashion doesn't give you any more agency over your free will. It might attack the claim that the universe is determinist but that doesn't mean free will suddenly exists because microparticles behave randomly. Also: You have no agency in randomness, so this isn't introducing any more free will. The point of free will determinism still stands. Microparticles are unimportant to the fact that your will is conditioned by your other forces which you cannot control, whether those be random or deterministic doesn't matter.
@@eleftheriosepikuridis9110 Probability is not randomness. plato.stanford.edu/entries/chance-randomness/
Are there more than two possibilities, ie, determinism or free agency?
Can a conscious being affect the probabilities of the processes happening in their brain and thereby affect consciousness itself?
Can you accept determinism and not reductionism?
@@PhokenKuul Well even with Probability, you don't have Agency over the outcome. You're wholly subject to whatever the particles wanna do any way, whether they are acting deterministically or probabilistically, you do not control either.
@@eleftheriosepikuridis9110 Are there more than two possibilities other than determinism or free agency? Can you accept determinism and not reductionism? How do particles "wanna do"? Who is this "you" that is controlling or failing to control and where does it come from?
Can you do indeterminism?
This series is going to cover all the major positions. It depends on what exactly you mean by indeterminism, If you mean the denial of determinism as defined here (encompassing both hard and soft determinism), then check out the previous video on Libertarianism (czcams.com/video/QCHFpclhGiQ/video.html), if you mean denial of hard determinism, check out the upcoming video on "Freedomism".
Ok thanks
But do you have video about moral epistemology?
Is the scientific academia going to recognize me for this?
Determinism just determine = black is black, red is red, white is white....mining don't know what happen if black plus red plus white.
Does determinism really exit?
If determinism is determining our choices does that mean it has consciousness?
How can determinism determine something without consciousness?
If determinism has no consciousness then how can determinism determine that we have consciousness if determinism cannot conceive consciousness?
If determinism is real then we are not, so why would determinism determine us to think we are real?
The parts do not control the whole. The whole decides what will happen with the parts.
@@caricue Do you mean the whole individual, the whole group, or the whole species? Or maybe all life in general?
@@joehobo8868 In this case, I mean that a whole organism makes choices and decisions and the atoms and molecules just react to whatever situation they find themselves in according to their nature. Atoms don't determine anything since they are passive objects.
In terms of groups, there is group behavior and individual behavior which feed into each other.
For species, evolution is manifested at the species level even though this is an artificial human made category and is the sum total of all the members.
I don't think "all life in general" is a useful grouping to explain very much, but I'm sure others do.
@@caricue Atoms and molecules are nothing but building blocks. We will never know where they came from or why any of it works. The more we learn the less we know, exponentially. We do know that life cannot out last the sun nor can we travel to another one. Tau Ceti is a little out of reach and we will never have enough tv tech to travel there. Even if we could it would literally be nothing more than a shot in the dark. This means that as we know all life is temporary, so is life itself.
Life is one large organism that feeds upon itself while morphing from one form to another in multiple lineal branches. All of this is done through DNA coding which must be writing its self or growing with contaminants. Contaminants seem to be the better choice as some form of consciousness would be needed to write its own coding or thus a magical god that had to overcome this dilemma itself.
No one knows what consciousness is nor how. when or why it came about. Maybe the real question is, does consciousness really exist or is it just some kind of by product that only thinks it exist? Well, according to the laws of determinism consciousness can not think because it has no brain. The body has the brain. The brain is the actor and the consciousness thinks, without a brain, that it is the audience. So if the consciousness thinks it exists it is because the brain is instructing it to think so. Why? If the consciousness is a by product that serves no purpose then, why would the brain expend valuable energy on a useless function when evolution is about, use it or lose it? Nature has always worked on a basis of elimination unwanted genes from the gene pool. Why is something without conscious thought conversing with others about something that does not exist, Freewill, which it should not be even able to comprehend since it never existed?
@@joehobo8868 I like the way you think and I wouldn't necessarily disagree with any of your ideas. Naturally, I have come to some different conclusions on certain matters, but you can't learn anything if you only talk to people who agree with you. I love your answer to the question of "all of life." You captured the banal horror of life in one sentence.
I approach the DNA question by acknowledging, as you did, that information is the product of mind. With this premise, the only conclusion is that DNA doesn't actually contain any information. DNA is used by ribosomes in the cell as a physical template to order amino acids into proteins. No information necessary, and besides, what good would information be to a ribosome. It is a molecular machine and has no mind. The scientist who looks at the DNA is the one who finds information in this physical structure, but that doesn't mean that it was already there, if you see what I mean?
I see consciousness as just another brain function. Even the simplest life form must have a basic, unconscious level of awareness. A cell must "know" what is self and non-self, what is inside and outside, what is food and what is dangerous. Evolution builds on this basic awareness as the creatures become more complex, eventually reaching the rich consciousness that we experience without ever losing the original basis. I conclude that the living matter of the brain is what is experiencing being alive, and in the end, this is consciousness, with the layers of perception and cognition contributing to the experience. This is why I don't see AI going very far in terms of being conscious. Consciousness is a feature of life, so with dead silicone, there will never be anyone home, even if it acts like there is.
These are interesting and crazy topics and it's nice to hear others well thought out points of view. Thanks for the respectful dialogue.
Does determinism really exit?
If you have no free will than you have no control, correct?
If you have no control then any feelings you have about anything that happens to you are not yours, correct?
So when you feel pain do you really feel pain?
If your 10 year old daughter terminated herself in front of you would you really care?
Is the survival of life important to you?
How can anyone justify right and wrong if right and wrong do not exist?
Why would determinism make us think we exist when we really do not exist?
All these questions can be answered with yes as it doesn't highlight any contradictory beliefs that determinists hold. Right and wrong are subjective, not objective. We exist.
Everything you say doesn't have to read in the video, you should rather write down keywords and short sentences, also please use pictures.
You explanation of quantum mechanics is all wrong, and I’m genuinely concerned where you heard those ideas from. There is nothing that says we are unable to measure position and momentum. The problem is that the measurement itself is intrinsically random. That’s the issue with quantum mechanics and determinism. It’s also a giant red herring because a totally random universe is no more “free” than a determined one. Libertarian free makes no sense either way.
Hmm. I would refer you to the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle. As for my source, here's the Oxford Companion to Philosophy: "...these put a fundamental limit on the accuracy with which one can simultaneously predict the values of certain pairs of physical magnitudes (termed 'incompatible'), such as the position and momentum of a particle...Bohr argued that the limitation is also ontic, rendering inapplicable the classical concepts of 'position' and 'momentum' to a particle."
That is not to say that issues like electrons existing in clouds of probability are not also used by libertarians to poke at determinism (as I note in the video, the example I use is just one of the libertarian's arguments, I mention the probability issue in the previous video). However, the same objections around interpretation of results and underdetermination work for either argument.
@@CarneadesOfCyrene Ah, that explains it. Popular science sources and philosophical encyclopedias tend to really suck at explaining quantum mechanics. Do you mind if I share some of my perspective? I've actually studied this stuff at the graduate level and published papers on it. It's the sort of thing I'd even like to make a video about someday.
First, it is entirely false to say that we are unable to simultaneously measure position/momentum. There is nothing to stop me from constructing a machine that performs whatever measurements I like, so that claim is trivially debunked.
Under the Copenhagen interpretation, the wavefunction can only tell us the *probability* of where the particle will be and what momentum it will have. That interpretation is also treated as a fundamental property of the particles themselves. The outcome of any specific measurement on position/momentum cannot ever be repeated with perfectly determined accuracy. It is a fundamentally random experiment that violates determinism in every philosophical respect. This is the part that makes free will enthusiasts happy, but it also kind of begs the question as to how utter randomness is supposed to change anything (which is why I personally think libertarian free will is incoherent).
The thing about position/momentum is that they are expressed as a Fourier transform relationship. If you've ever studied Fourier transforms, then it should intuitive how squishing the function down in one domain necessarily blows it up in the other. In QM, this means anything that squishes the variance on position will necessarily increase the variance on momentum (physicists often use the word "uncertainty" here, but that's a misnomer. The statistical term is standard deviation; or you can square that to get variance). This is what Heisenburg's uncertainty relationship tells us. Any attempt to reduce the variance on one parameter will necessarily increase the variance on the other. That means I can rig an experiment where position behaves very determined (i.e., low variance), but then the momentum will blow up in randomness (high variance). It's not a problem in the measurement, though. Again, it is an intrinsic property of the particles themselves. The particles simply won't have the same momentum, no matter how much you try to perfectly replicate the initial conditions of the experiment (or vice/versa on position).
Incidentally, this all kind of changes depending on what interpretation you give to QM. Copenhagen is the de-facto "standard," but it has numerous philosophical issues as well. I personally think Many-Worlds solves them, but that's another story.
No way to get from the micro to the macro - of course not - it's not like you can make decisions based on the outcome of a quantum dice. That whole section on Quantum mechanics was a mess; straw man determinism of the gaps argument.
First!
The problem with speed in reading keeps viewers away from your channel
Put playback speed at 0.75 and you will get a slower talking speed.
You will never get a sound like the original one, I know this, but boring