Free Will
 

Free will is human agency and volition. There's nothing mysterious about it. It doesn't mean that the "laws" of physics are being violated nor does it mean that any chains of causality are being broken.

Free will requires causality. Acausal events are random. There is no choice in randomness, only chance. Therefore anyone still hung up on the notion that free will is free from causality is simply wrong. Free choices aren't random, they aren't free from being caused but rather they are caused in the right way based on the beliefs and desires of the agent. A choice is made freely when the agent could have chosen otherwise if the agents beliefs and desires were different.

Now that determinism and causality are out of the way some people still might point to neuroscience as proving we don't have volition and they would be wrong.

If you want to get at the real scientific data and read what neuroscience has to say on the issue then read The Volitional Brain: Towards a Neuroscience of Free Will by Anthony Freeman, Benjamin Libet and Keith Sutherland.

As for actual scientific journals that have had articles that agree with human agency:

Volition and Conflict in Human Medial Frontal Cortex
Current Biology, Volume 15, Issue 2, 122-128

"Controversy surrounds the role of human medial frontal cortex in controlling actions [1, 2, 3, 4 and 5]. Although damage to this area leads to severe difficulties in spontaneously initiating actions [6], the precise mechanisms underlying such “volitional” deficits remain to be established. Previous studies have implicated the medial frontal cortex in conflict monitoring [7, 8, 9 and 10] and the control of voluntary action [11 and 12], suggesting that these key processes are functionally related or share neural substrates. Here, we combine a novel behavioral paradigm with functional imaging of the oculomotor system to reveal, for the first time, a functional subdivision of the pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA) into anatomically distinct areas that respond exclusively to either volition or conflict. We also demonstrate that activity in the supplementary eye field (SEF) distinguishes between success and failure in changing voluntary action plans during conflict, suggesting a role for the SEF in implementing the resolution of conflicting actions. We propose a functional architecture of human medial frontal cortex that incorporates the generation of action plans and the resolution of conflict."

Human volition: towards a neuroscience of will
Nature Reviews Neuroscience 9, 934-946

"The capacity for voluntary action is seen as essential to human nature. Yet neuroscience and behaviourist psychology have traditionally dismissed the topic as unscientific, perhaps because the mechanisms that cause actions have long been unclear. However, new research has identified networks of brain areas, including the pre-supplementary motor area, the anterior prefrontal cortex and the parietal cortex, that underlie voluntary action. These areas generate information for forthcoming actions, and also cause the distinctive conscious experience of intending to act and then controlling one's own actions. Volition consists of a series of decisions regarding whether to act, what action to perform and when to perform it. Neuroscientific accounts of voluntary action may inform debates about the nature of individual responsibility."

To Do or Not to Do: The Neural Signature of Self-Control
The Journal of Neuroscience, August 22, 2007, 27(34):9141-9145

"Voluntary action is fundamental to human existence. Recent research suggests that volition involves a specific network of brain activity, centered on the fronto-median cortex. An important but neglected aspect of intentional action involves the decision whether to act or not. This decision process is crucial in daily life because it allows us to form intentions without necessarily implementing them. In the present study, we investigate the neural correlates of intentionally inhibiting actions using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Our data show that a specific area of the fronto-median cortex is more strongly activated when people prepare manual actions but then intentionally cancel them, compared with when they prepare and then complete the same actions. Our results suggest that the human brain network for intentional action includes a control structure for self-initiated inhibition or withholding of intended actions. The mental control of action has an enduring scientific interest, linked to the philosophical concept of "free will." Our results identify a candidate brain area that reflects the crucial decision to do or not to do."

We have free will. It just isn't anything magical like some might have thought.

But even observing the extra energy a person expends when faced with different choices does not tell you if they would or would not make the same choice every time. If they always come to the same conclusion, having the same history and given the same options, they aren't exercising free will.

That's because you think free will equals randomness. It doesn't. Having the same history means having the same beliefs and desires. Given the same beliefs and desires why would you expect me to make a different random decision? Why do you think free will means leaving things up to chance?

So your free will has a cause huh? lol

I dont know man, your argument seems odd to me. I dont think its a radical freewill. I think your trying to describe a soft determinism type of freewill, that still is determinism to me.

So you're saying that humans behave exactly as if they are agents and have volition but they don't really because of [insert some unprovable philosophical garbage about determinism here].

:lol:

We do not have free will, and it still isn't magical.

You cannot dismiss causality so easily. You are right that randomness does not bring free will or volition as some have suggested since the basic process is still mechanical and merely deviates from ordinary causality in a non-volitional way. At best, randomness does not help the issue because it is not "your" randomness so nothing of your possible free will is involved with it.

Let us take a distilled mental experiment and see how causality (even if randomly perturbed) constrains all of our choices until there are none remaining. --

You are walking along a narrow path halfway up the side of a smooth cliff. On your left, rubbing your shoulder, is the smooth cliff face. To your right is empty air for a thousand feet. Lunch or some other ordinary goal awaits at the end of your walk, but you stop partway along, where there is a small alcove cut from the rock where you might stand off the path. You have decided to put your free will to a test. You define three possible choices: turn left, go straight (to lunch), or turn right. The stage just set, which of those three choices can you make?

You may recognize that human perception of reality is imperfect so you might mistakenly believe that the void is on your left and the safe alcove on your right. Can you, in that moment, change either your belief about reality or your goal of having lunch? That is, can you change what you called above your "beliefs and desires"? On what basis do you do so? Can you really control your beliefs and desires to the extent that you could decide to step off into the void at that moment?

I say not. Every "decision" we make is indeed colored by beliefs and desires, as you say, but they, along with other factors like whether there is a place to stand on, totally control the outcome of each decision. It is our inability to break that specific causal chain that denies us free will.

Suppose you have a bad habit and (thousands of sensory inputs like friend's cautions and health-care warnings, make you suddenly decide to quit. Can you simply turn off the desire for that activity or do you have to set up another chain of events to force yourself into a different path?

If the universe is, in fact, strictly causal (purely random elements acknowledged), then potential choices are illusory except for the one that causality decrees.

Of course, through evolution, we must "feel" certain that we have free will because we could not function mentally otherwise. This is one reason why tightly confined, regimented people who are denied any form of creativity or choice will generally rapidly become deranged robots.

Nature has discovered, quite by accident, that it is easier to evolve an emotion of free will than to evolve actual free will. That is partly because true free will would require a whole different and currently unknown force by which ordinary causality could be diverted.

Large, please, with extra cinnamon! :):heart:

You are right, but even different choices (outcomes), under those conditions, do not demonstrate free will because there is no way to account for all of the influences to be sure they are always the same.

This time, instead of the large, I chose the medium PopCorn because, on very deep introspection, I had a small stone in my sock this time.

There is also the cumulative factor: even with everything else held constant, the choice of a second box of PopCorn has to be colored by having had the first.

It seems you have a fairly distorted view of the laws of nature and causality. Causality doesn't force anything. The laws of nature are just a description. How do you think a description is able to force something to happen? How do you even know these unobservable forces exist? What's the difference between the regularities of nature simply being a coincidence versus there being some underlying hidden causality that forces things to be the way they are? How can you prove this difference is real? What empirical observations lead you to believe that there are forces at work causing things to be the way they have to be.

Do you really expect me to believe that you can tell the difference between real choices and illusory choices just based on your gut instinct?

Free will does not mean leaving anything up to chance. That would be making choices by flipping a coin and it is still causal to the decision.

You have eliminated all of the forces under which causality works and you have eliminated randomness (and I agree), so now what is the process of free will? Is it (as some have suggested) a fifth physical force whose effect on matter is measurable and predictable yet which can psycho-analyze the agent to evaluate his beliefs, desires, biases, immediate needs, mood, and his historical experiences of love and hatred?

Renaming free will "volition" and saying that it may manifest itself in some parts of some brain activity does not define it very well.

Y'know what goes real well with beer (yes, of course more beer)? Hot buttered popcorn with Cinnamon. :):heart:

The physical laws work just fine as descriptions. They don't control anything. There's nothing being forced at all. Whatever happens in nature, there are true descriptions of it. There are regularities in nature but that's just the way nature is. There's no need for hidden forces or laws that govern the universe. That's a throwback from religion.

Causality remains but it's a description of what happens, not something that controls it.

No need for huffiness. Also I don't remember mentioning my considerable gut as a citation for my information.

We use the term "laws of nature" as a verbal shorthand for our observation that events fall into regular patterns and that those patterns can be used to predict future events. It is that predictability that makes the "laws" seem to be actual cosmic laws and not just coincidences.

Of course there is no gravity cop at every cosmic intersection (down to Plank scale) directing every particle where to go. It does make conversation easier to just call it the Law of Gravity and to note, along with Einstein, that the great miracle of this universe is that there are no miracles.

I can determine whether choice A is a real choice and choice B is an illusion, and without inspecting my inward parts, by showing that every event in the causal chains leading to them is in place and the chains are intact. This eliminates choice A as a "real" choice since only an acausal force (and for human volition, a psychologically directed acausal force) can break the causal chain and that force is currently unknown or even conjectured.

Right, I understand that. The question I'm asking is, what is the empirical research that can prove the difference between a cosmic coincidence and a cosmic law?

The next question, assuming you can answer that, is, why do these laws exist? I assume, unless you're a theist, you'll just say "that's just the way things are". We can agree that all explanations must come to an end. At some point you have to stop asking "why" and say "that's just how things are".

The problem is that you need to stop your explanation BEFORE you cross the line into superfluous unempirical metaphysics. Unless you can design some kind of experiment that can test for things that "have to be the way they are" and things that "just are the way they are" then the best thing for science to do is reject it. It's not needed and puts us on unempirical grounds, where science doesn't belong.

Sure you can, the only problem is that the same thing can be said for a string of coincidences. A precedes B precedes C and so on. But you can't actually perform any experiment that can tell the difference between A causing B causing C or simply that A coincides with B coincides with C. There's no testable difference yet you insist that you know there is one. How?

When studied, the "what happens", behaves as though it was under the complete control of forces and states. If this were not true then Newton's gravity equations would be useless. So, either free will is just a part of that causality and hence illusory (since there are no real choices in that case) or free will must be a way to circumvent or distort causality (which, for conversational purposes, I have called a force by analogy with the Newtonian forces).

My position is not a throwback to religion, but a refutation of it. I do not believe there is any extra or hidden force that enables free will for the same reason I do not believe in angels, no evidence plus an entirely adequate explanation using only the known forces.

We can agree that there are regularities in nature that allow us to make predictions. The question I'm asking you is, are there any experiments you can perform that can prove that these things are controlled and aren't simply extremely large coincidences?

Let me put it simpler, what is the testable difference between a law that controls a coin to land 50 heads in a row versus a coincidence that there happen to be 50 heads in a row? What have you really explained with declaring that there is a law that gives 50 heads in row? With or without the idea of a law we can still make the predictions. It's completely superfluous.

So can anybody tell me if KnowledgeIsPower has been totally owned by Sternwallow because of free will or some other causality? :eh:

Haha, here's a challenge for you ghouslime.

Imagine two universes that are identical in every way but one.

In universe A there is a law that governs the outcome of every coin flipped so that there is always 50 heads in a row followed by 1 tail and so on.. 50 heads, 1 tail, 50 heads, 1 tail..

In universe B everything is exactly the same in every way except that there isn't a law that governs the outcome of every coin flipped but it just so happens by coincidence that every coin flipped comes out 50 heads, 1 tail, 50 heads, 1 tail and so on..

Now try to think of an experiment that you could perform to verify which of these two universes you are in.

When you realize that there is no experiment you could perform to do that, you will also realize why the claim that our universe is under some kind of control is unempirical.

And thus you can never prove free will. THAT'S exactly what I was trying to say before.

Now, THIS is what I call a discussion! :)
You and I have been imprecise in our use of the language. There is no provable difference between a cosmic coincidence and an event that conforms to our understanding of a cosmic law. However, if one searches the last 13 Billion years or so and finds evidence for not a single instance of failure to conform to that law, one could be very wrong about the law even existing and yet would be justified in betting the planet on the outcome of the next few such events. Science is not about proof and I assume you do not really mean "proof" in your post.
Another good question. I wonder, if laws exist, whether it matters much to our use of them as models of real system behaviors, "why" or "how" or "must" they exist.

Why is F = MA? Because, if it wasn't, we would use another equation instead. There is no necessity for F = MA to be true. Some deist kind of god might have decreed it, I suppose. Personally I think that the laws and constants in this universe are simply those under which such a universe can develop. Again, because, if they were different, it wouldn't be in this universe.
I see no scientific grounds for rejecting the vast collected body of knowledge that has been gleaned at great individual effort over tens of millenia. But I do not see why you care about the distinction between something that must be versus something that just is, when the things have already occurred. What is the probability that all of the electronic states in my CPU would take on the exact pattern down to each individual bit, two seconds ago? Exactly 1.0000000000... .

Remember that empirical methods are not strictly limited to what can be performed in controlled laboratory experiments.
I guess you never heard the story about the old guy sitting on his front porch watching a dog chase a rabbit around the house around and around and finally decided based on his observations that rabbits cause dogs.

I also guess you have not heard of repeatability. Without repeatability of some sort a phenomenon cannot be verified and so must be accepted, if at all, with only a tiny reliance. However, if a phenomenon does show repeatability, its probability of being a real phenomenon goes up accordingly. Some phenomena have been verified and repeated so often that you are willing to trust your life and that of your loved ones (if any) to it without a qualm.

There is no religion or mysticism or metaphysics involved here. It is as simple as "2+2=6 ... -2" as Cal insists.

I think that using known physical laws (yes, I know it is verbal shorthand) to model a situation and, from them to predict that there will be a 50 head run in the next 50 flips would disqualify that run as a coincidence. You are right that it might still really be a coincidence that the system behaved as though it was not a coincidence. Since we are not in the realm of proof and absolutes (that is mathematics), we can, as we must, work based on the probabilities and we will occasionally be wrong, say once every 10^100 times.

you can simply get the desired probability that it is a coincidence by how many times you do the experiment. Since no absolute proof (of anything) will ever be forthcoming for the entire concept to make sense some degree of improbability will have to be set so as to make any observations meaningful, and therefore one could, within those bounds, "prove" which universe it was.

I don't really think I owned KIP since that would require volition and, by my own argument, I have none. But that would mean that I didn't own my argument either so maybe, in a small way, I did own part of KIP. I just can't decide empirically. :)

not me- I'll stick to psychology and criminals thank you- much easier :|

You can't determine which universe you are in because both of them are being controlled in the same way, to the same extent and with the same outcomes. The universe you say does not have this law, obviously does have it since, using it to model the behavior of the universe yields the same result as the universe with the explicitly identified law.

You logic failed when you defined an invalid difference between the two universes which are, in every way identical INCLUDING whatever it is that is apparent in the pattern of their behaviors.

Wrong, I've already stipulated that one universe has a law for coin flips and the other one doesn't. You can't design an experiment to tell us the difference between the two yet you insist that there is some hidden difference. This is just a baseless assertion and whatever can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.

Why won't looking at the statistics of tossing tell you which universe it is?

Let me explain it again. Both universes have the same behavior. One is controlled by laws so that a coin flip always has 50 heads, 1 tail, 50 heads and so on.

The other universe behaves the same way, 50 heads, 1 tail, 50 heads, 1 tail but there is no law controlling it, it's simply a huge unexplained coincidence.

This means that no matter which universe you are in, the lawful universe or the one that behaves the same way out of chance, you will always flip a coin get 50 heads, then 1 tail, 50 heads, 1 tail and so on...

Any experiment you perform in either universe is always going to come up with the same results. There is no detectable difference between a universe that controls a coin into behaving a certain way and a coin that just happens to have the same results by randomness or chance.

But if there's no law controlling it and it's a huge coincidence then you will be able to tell by taking a large number of samples. A "coincidence" is nothing more than a statistical outlier, and the more you measure the less of these there will be. The only way increased observation would continue to support the original observation is if there is in fact some law governing it. All you have to do to know what universe you are in is toss many many times.

No, there's no upper size to a coincidence and I'm talking huge. In both universes, if you toss it 50 times or 50 million times you still get the same results, even if you toss the coin forever you will still get the same results. How can you prove which one has a law controlling it and which one will be just a really big coincidence?

Also let me remind you that we're talking about designing an experiment that we can actually carry out in one of these universes. We can't "flip a coin forever" to find out how it behaves. At some point we have to stop the experiment. It's not possible to flip a coin forever. How will you know, even though in both universes you got the same results, which universe you are in?

In that case I don't think I understand the nature of this coincidence because random chance follows very well defined statistical rules and what you are describing doesn't. Indeed, the coincidence you describe seems to me to have properties more like those of a physical law, in which case I would have to agree with Sternwallow's earlier assessment.

I'm not talking about randomness. These coins aren't random. They are predictable. Each coin in each universe can always be predicted but one is governed by laws and one isn't.

It seems like the question is being avoided.

You are talking about randomness. Even though a law (and I'm not even going to get into the impossibility of such a law) says that you toss and get head 50 times and then tail once, you won't actually get that, you'll get a 50:1 statistical average after you satisfy the central limit theorem. IF you do really mean that you will always get that exact sequence then you're describing a universe so different to our own that you can use it to suggest anything you want. In your universe you'd be able to have a coin that had been tossed 50 times previously and know for sure it would give you tails the next time (quite handy for settling bets, especially in this universe where everyone will always call heads).

The question is not being avoided, it simply doesn't make sense.

http://lizzyhouse.typepad.com/lizzyh...on_popcorn.jpg

:heart: :kiss:

It's called a thought experiment. You don't seem interested in actually thinking it through. I'm not trying to prove anything about our universe. I'm trying to prove that physical laws as governing forces are superfluous concepts but you have to be willing to actually play along and try to think it through.

Since you can't see through the thought experiment to the end I'll just tell you the conclusion.

There's no observable difference between a universe with laws that govern us and a universe that is orderly because that's just the way it is for no reason at all.

The idea of controlling laws is thusly rejected due to a lack of empirical evidence.

Thought experiments have to make sense too, otherwise what's the point? All you have demonstrated with your flawed thought experiment is that an undefined "coincidence" that leads to behavior indistinguishable from an undefined physical law is functionally the same as that law.

:|

I think you might have actually understood it finally.

The question remains, if they are indistinguishable then why do some people insist on saying "no no, it's not a coincidence, it's a law that we are controlled by"?

You said yourself that your so-called thought experiment proves nothing about this universe. That's one of the few areas where we agree. The fact that your "argument" demonstrates the equivalence of two undefined things is because it is tautological to begin with,and as such entirely trivial.

Well you can turn your nose up at it if you like but based on these unempirical metaphysical grounds, the idea that physical laws force me to do anything and therefore I'm just a causal robot with no choice about anything is rejected.

Those can't be the right words for the things you mean.

Oh no! The final conclusion of your argument is that you cannot know if we are all robots or not.

The conclusion that I have reached and most other scientists have reached as well, is that the physical laws are only a description of nature and as far as I know, a description never forced anyone to do anything.

Most other scientists? Are you saying that you are a scientist?

Demonstrating that we cannot prove determinism is not proving free will. Perhaps this would be a good time to call in your scientist friends.

(I knew you were going to try to pull that shell game as soon as you set up your scenario, and I'm so glad you concluded before I stopped working to play...perhaps I willed it :D )

Check the first post for citations of scientific articles backing up my claims regarding human agency and volition. I've already provided evidence for the obvious claim that humans formulate plans, make decisions, and all the other kinds of behavior associated with agency and volition.

It depends on how you define scientist. If you define a scientist as someone with a lot of knowledge regarding science then that's me. If you define a scientist as someone with a college degree in science then that's me again. If you define a scientist as a guy that stands around in a white lab coat pouring liquids into flasks then no, I'm not a scientist.

"science" is pretty vague. Could you please be a bit more specific as to the type of science in which you claim pedigree?

Would you be so kind as to tell us what degree you have?

I do not define someone with a lot of knowledge of science as a scientist (teachers have a lot of knowledge about science); I would say that a scientist is someone who creates that knowledge. A degree is irrelevant, however, it is very unusual for those without them to make any kind of real contribution to scientific knowledge these days.

pedigree
• noun 1 the record of descent of an animal, showing it to be pure-bred. 2 a person’s lineage or ancestry. 3 the history or provenance of a person or thing.

— ORIGIN from Old French pé de grue ‘crane’s foot’, a mark used to denote succession in pedigrees.

Which of these definitions are you referring to?

The "argument" should have ended at this point. UBS - right. KnowledgeIsWanting - wrong, and an argumentative dick.

My understanding is that the general consensus in the cognitive sciences is free will does not exist, but the variables in our world are so extensive that we have the illusion of free-will.

As you have already demonstrated, we can never know either way. If either of our sources had a solid argument, I'm sure one or the other of us would have presented it.

What you demonstrated in your initial post was that the neurons in the brain fire before instructing muscles to take action. You didn't demonstrate how, with equivalent dna and history I would choose a different ice cream in an instant replay.

Ahh, so you mean have I published papers? Nope, haven't done that yet, only a B.A. in computer science (specializing in artificial intelligence). I'm still young. ;)

It appears as if KnowledgeIsPower spends a bit too much time tossing it. :\

Ouch man, that really hurts. What have I done to you?

As far as the "I can never prove free will" red herring. I'm not interested in that. As long as all arguments against free will are defeated then I'm happy with not worrying about unprovable unempirical metaphysical claims about what I might and might not be able to do.

As far as science can tell me, I have a brain capable of making decisions. There's nothing more required for me to prove because that's all I'm interested in proving.

Jump out of your window, smart guy, and will yourself not to land on your head.

What would you call an arrogant little college shit who spends the afternoon arguing with a real scientist?

Always cite your sources.

I have no need to. You can tie yourself in knots over some unempirical claims about being controlled by mysterious causal forces but I'm not concerned with the unprovable. There's no reason for me to think I'm controlled by anything.

I think she might have been trying to confirm if you are genetically a jackass.

Why don't you just relax tough guy. I'm sure you're real important around here but I really don't give a shit. Everyone on Earth is an egotistical prick so don't try to single me out you flaming fuckhead.

On the contrary, you’ve been blowing out shit like a chocolate soft-serve ice cream machine. You’ve given more than your share of shit for one day.

Everyone on Earth is an egotistical prick? You seem to feel you are uniquely qualified to pass judgment on everyone and everything.

With an omniscient wave of his hand, KnowledgeIsPower pronounces all of the mechanics of the universe at the whim of his mighty will! :rolleyes:

I single you out, because you are the only blustering egomaniac at the moment strutting around my cyber neighborhood blowing his ass horn.

She did, asshole. Notice the part where she said, "my understanding".

Sounds like the kind of evidence some bible thumper would provide.

Well I really have nothing else to say for now. Apparently there are some invisible forces that control everything I do. Somehow this is proof that I don't perform voluntary actions. I just hope you can see why I am skeptical of such claims.

"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -Delos McKown

KnowledgeIsPower, welcome to the forums! Please, leave your superiority complex at the door. Our membership is varied - scientists, professionals in business and healthcare, military officers, educators, attorneys, journalists - this is a great place to blow off steam, make fun of religion, hold discussions, and pal around with baby-eaters from all over the globe. Claiming you're a (young) BA in Computer Science ranks about the middle of the pack of active members in terms of knowledge, education, and experience.

We're not asking you to conform, or be happy here; honestly, we couldn't really care. But, as you stated, you are young, so if you don't have a problem with being open-minded and learning from others while throwing convention out the window, you just might have some fun here.

Some might say that the attitude you present is a bit high and mighty. Others would wonder why you just showed up in our living room and took a big, steamy dump on the floor. And others will ask, "Do you do anal?"

I stayed out of the Free Will argument, 'cause I wanted to see where it went. I find it interesting you never brought up probability (Choobus & Sternwallow did, however). Are you familiar with probabilistic thought? As a computer scientist, I'm sure you've heard about granularity with regard to understanding the scope of systems. I'm just wondering if you're taking too focused a view of acausal randomness, which on a larger scale, may show predictable probabilistic tendencies.

So, what do you think of luxury?

It seems like you didn't have very much to say when you started this shit.

Ah! Did that poor little puppy get poo poo rubbed in his nose? :(

Yes actually one of the books I'm currently reading is "Bayesian Brain: Probabilistic Approaches to Neural Coding".

I think it's too complex to try to argue about free will using probabilities, especially when it's really a secondary issue compared to the larger issue of the prescriptive view of physical laws.

As for comments about my attitude. I would appreciate it if everyone would just ignore any perceived arrogance on my part because my choice of words is often dry and to the point but I'm not meaning to be that way.

I'd like for us all to consider each other equals and to be friendly and polite but I know that there will always be some people that resist that and are combative and antagonistic by habit so I will have to keep an impersonal and objective attitude. I'm sorry if that upsets anyone but kindly get over it. You've decided not to like me and you can easily decide to like me as well. Whichever you prefer doesn't bother me.

I strongly agree about the highlighted passage. :)

I dispute the basis on which you claim that there is a difference between universes of identical content and behavior. Your point, I think, is thereby reduced to having two names, law and coincidence, meaning the same thing.

Both a law and a coincidence are descriptions of patterns of behavior. For me, coincidence implies a lack of regularity while a law implies the opposite. That is the main reason why I say that a law enables prediction of future behaviors while coincidence does not. See the "Halting Problem" in algorithms for reasons why it is insufficient to say that eventually a string of coincidences will break down, but the behavior of a law will not.

If you find 50 heads in a row in a recorded session of coin tosses (you realize that coin tosses are really deterministic, but we use the example for a convenient metaphor for randomness, that is, explicitly without a governing law) you cannot be sure whether it was due to law or coincidence, but, if you predict that the next 50 tosses will be heads and they are, you are entitled to strongly suspect something like a law was the model for that prediction.

Equivalently, if you are given a book of tosses and you correctly predict that a run of 50 heads will be on the 22nd page, 15th line and starting 12th entry from the left margin, that would also strongly suggest a controlling or guiding force, even if the book was really created through purely random, that is, undirected, means.

Finding patterns in random things can be a tedious kind of entertainment for some people. The complete expansion of the decimal representation of Pi can, in principle, be found embedded within the decimal expansion of Pi an infinite number of times. It still does not support or refute free will.

I think that, by his definition of the problem, both sets of stats would be identical, one by rule (algorithm) and the other randomly just happening to match.

Is that right, KIP?

coincidence
• noun 1 a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection. 2 correspondence in nature or in time of occurrence.

— DERIVATIVES coincident adjective coincidental adjective coincidentally adverb.

This is from the Oxford English dictionary.

Seems to me that your "difference" does not matter. If we want to know the next toss in either universe, we can use the law and we will be right. Ah, but that implies that the law DOES work in both universes and is not absent from the one you have designated as lawless.

My two newly hypothesized universes are also identical in all respects except that universe A has gravity and the masses in universe B act completely randomly yet coincidentally, behaving exactly as though there was universal gravity in effect there. So Newtonian physics would work equally well in either universe and it still would not substantiate free will.

Yes, let me rephrase it in more technical language.

In universe A there is a cause for each coin having a predictable pattern of 50 heads, 1 tail, 50 heads, 1 tail, and so on...

In universe B there is no cause for each coin having a predictable pattern of 50 heads, 1 tail, 50 heads, 1 tail, and so on... It simply just happens.

How can you tell the difference between the two by experimentation?

We can make predictions even in the universe without the law causing or controlling anything. So how can there be predictions that tell you which is which?

I think I'm getting KIP's point thought I still do not agree with it. He got a little extra complication with the 50 heads then 1 tail then another 50 heads. Let's say, for the coin in question , that, even though it mechanically could be forced into a tails condition, the flipping law (obtained by long observation) said that it would always be heads. In the other universe, the one without this law, the identical coin also shows heads every time, but there is no such constraining law. Statistics fail to differentiate between the two universes.

My view is that a universe that always flips heads, by definition has a constraining law (not a force or a legislation) that can form a model of behavior in either universe.

I think it is a little like knowing that nuclear decay is truly random, that is, without an underlying rule or guide, and then finding a mass of material, one and only one of whose atoms decays every single 0.1 second until the entire mass is converted. It would be difficult to call that behavior random, but such would be the case.

You touched upon a good point here. People that demand there be a law to dictate this behavior end up with odd notions of little clocks running down inside each nucleus. How can statistical laws have some hidden underlying cause?

If you just take the laws as descriptions of nature there's no problem. That's just the way radioactive decay works. There are regularities in nature and this is one of them.

:thumbsup:

The prediction is a law if it always works. You have therefore defined a self-contradicting scenario. One universe has material with properties and the other has material with no properties, but instead has something that is identical to having properties.

But if the physical laws are governed by probability, then how can you consider such probability to be a secondary issue?

Holy fuck! I guess you don't have to take statistical thermodynamics to do computer science these days. Pity, you might have learned some important things.

That is my position!

A law is a description that is always true about nature. Period. It doesn't matter if there are little causality rays forcing anything to happen.

If you always flip a coin and you get 50 heads, 1 tail then that's a law. It doesn't matter if it's a coincidence or not.

Now, to go beyond that and instead of just saying "all flipped coins produce 50 heads, 1 tail in a regular pattern" and also say "because there is a law that requires that to happen" is the unempirical part. A purely descriptive view of physical laws leaves off this last superfluous claim. There's nothing forcing coins to do anything, they just do that and that's the way things are.

I think you've already agreed with me so just to keep from turning you off my position I'd like to say that this isn't something I came up with. David Hume is the person usually credited for this view. It's actually a very popular view for science other than in America because we're run by religious nutters that thinks God controls everything, including physics.

Nice begging the question there.

You have shown only that controlling laws cannot be either validated or rejected since they cannot differentiate between the two cases (assuming that you actually and correctly defined two really different cases).
If, for practical purposes, we accept the coincidence hypothesis, there is no way to progress since we cannot know or even guess what will happen next. Since coincidence is there for no particular reason, it can change or even disappear also for no reason.

But, adopting the controlling law model, does enable us to make usable and profitable predictions.

You may say "that is just the way things are", but I say "here is what to expect that things will be."

You've completely missed the point here. There's no governing. Laws don't do anything, they are just true descriptions of nature.

We insist that using a "law" as a model for the behavior of our little part of the universe is useful in ways that random (undirected) happenstance is not.

This is already a problem for science, called the problem of induction. Are you familiar with it?

Wrong, you gain nothing by positing unprovable laws. We can still have physical laws as pure descriptions and make predictions by assuming that regularities that have always been observed will continue to be observed, this again get's us into the problem of induction.

I look into my crystal ball and see KIP talking to himself in his own little thread much like ricardocoav. :|

Not begging anything. I can't be bothered to talk to you about science any more because I see ignorant kids like you all the time (usually bitching about low grades) and so it is obvious that there's nothing to be gained by thrashing out this dead horse any further. Why don't you explain to Sternwallow though how the statistical behavior of large collections of atoms has no underlying cause. It might be amusing.