i don't know

In other words, it seems like you think you're disagreeing with some idea or belief of mine. What belief of mine are you disagreeing with specifically? Since you haven't clarified, I don't know.


Maybe you're not even disagreeing with anything I said or believe. I have no idea. You refuse to clarify, so I don't know. You're leaving it up to me to guess, and I'm far from psychic.

If I reply to someone, and they're asking me how my reply relates to what I said, what I'd do is I'd quote the thing they said specifically, possibly paraphrase it, as in, "because you said this, I interpret that to mean you believe such-and-such", and then go on to explain how what I'm saying is a response to such-and-such.

But you're not quoting me, you're not showing me the thing I said that you're responding to. You're just saying more things about what you think, without relating them to anything I said, so it just seems increasingly random and unrelated to what I said.

Like that kid who says "I like turtles"

you aren't relating what you're saying to anything I said. You aren't even referencing anything I said. How can you possibly explain how these things relate to what I said if you're not referencing what I said?

I need to leave the forum because I'm asking for clarification? That doesn't seem reasonable

I can't think of any reason why you're saying this to me

what does that have to do with anything I said? I don't know why you're saying that. It seems completely out of context.

ok, you have no desire to impart understanding from you to me. I guess that's the end of that then.

yes, a lack of understanding, that's why I'm asking you questions and trying to get you to clarify. Do you want to clarify, or would you prefer it if I didn't understand what you're talking about?

that doesn't seem simple to me. Seems like there's a huge gap in relating that to what I said.

Do you believe that perpetual motion machines are possible to build? Do you believe living organisms are perpetual motion machines?

I can't quite see how this is a response to my post. How do you feel about ramen noodles?

No I can't. — Metaphysician Undercover

What about friction, heat loss, things like that? When a machine loses energy, it doesn't just lose it into the void, it gets transferred to other things in its immediate environment.

The concept of energy doesn't dictate that energy is really lost, if you want to relate entropy to energy, entropy is more about patterns of distribution of energy.

Furthermore, we all know that it is obviously false, and that's why we know that perpetual motion machines are impossible. T — Metaphysician Undercover

Can you think of a different reason why perpetual motion machines would be impossible?

wonderful.

That ai just told me that conservation of energy isn't shielded from falsification like that.

https://chatgpt.com/share/67d36240-7604-8002-b429-66d510eb756c

The idea of "conservation of energy" is a foundational principle in physics, and it is not immune to falsification

If experimental evidence were to contradict the principle of energy conservation in a way that couldn’t be explained by other factors, it would force a revision of our current understanding.

strictly speaking, no scientific statement is falsifiable because any scientific statement has an out.

Let's say you come up with a theory that says "such-and-such reduces infection". We do a double blind study and find that such-and-such doesn't reduce infection. "It's falsified!" you might say. No no no, it's not falsified, perhaps what actually happened is we just happened to, by pure chance, select only patients who happened to be unresponsive to such-and-such. It really is an effective treatment, we just got unlucky.

That's how you just treated conservation of energy.

But NON-strictly speaking, falsifiability isn't about that. Falsifiability is about "what would you need to see to stop believing this idea?" And if we saw a drug -not- work like I just laid out, people would stop believing it. So it's, in practice, falsifiable.

And if we lived in a world where objects had a total greater velocity after collision, we probably wouldn't live in a world where physicists believed energy is conserved. So even though strictly speaking there's always an out, in practice it's just as falsifiable as we would want it to be.

Yes, it would. You could just insist nothing is falsifiable by providing an out for any contrary observation.

that kind of idea would make ANYTHING unfalsifiable, not just conservation of energy. is tthat your position? that all statements are unfalsifiable?

Conservation of energy is neither falsifiable nor provable — Banno

You don't think it's falsifiable? I think it is. I think it's absolutely falsifiable. Two balls smashing into each other and bouncing away from each other each at a greater velocity than when they collided would be one way to falsify it.

A perpetual motion machine might too.

Gladly. The argument made in the OP doesn't posit that it's impossible that one could make a different choice in a rewind scenario (or, in the article linked, it would be phrased as, he's not positing that Bob2 couldn't make a different choice than Bob1). He's expressly assuming that IS possible.

But, if Bob2 makes a different choice from Bob1, while being perfectly identical to Bob1 in every way, then it would seem that the source of that different choice can't be ultimately from within Bob. Bob isn't the source himself of that difference. Because how could he be? Bob2 is the same as Bob1.

The source of the difference, as far as many of us can see, would just be randomness in such a scenario. So how is it that that's the source of libertarian freedom?

Another way to put it is:

You cannot explain a difference by appealing to factors that are identical across both cases. If Bob1 and Bob2 are physically and mentally and spiritually identical, then any difference in their choices must be due to factors not contained within Bob.

yeah those kinds of things are my worry.

I'm on the fence about that one, curious what others think

What I meant with that is if in that 'rewind' scenario we could not make a different choice, then libertarian free will would seem to be ruled out by definition, since any consistent notion of libertarian free will requires that we could have made a different choice — Janus

You are correct, of course, I'm just saying that's not the direction of argument being made here.

But, you know, in simple terms, if everything is happening the same way every time you replay with the same starting conditions, that is in a very straight forward way what it means for something to be deterministic, right?

ChatGPT said:

Yeah, if every time you reset the system to the same initial conditions, it evolves in exactly the same way, then in the most straightforward sense, that’s what we mean by a deterministic system.

The extra philosophical layers we discussed—about high-level properties, rational norms, and interpretation—introduce complications about how we describe and explain what’s happening, but they don’t change the basic fact that, at the fundamental level, the system itself is unfolding in a fully determined way.

Would you say, then, that the distinction you're drawing is less about whether the system is deterministic and more about whether determinism at the physical level is the right kind of explanation for high-level rational agency?

Determinism doesn't have a whole lot of criteria. It really doesn't matter to me what you wrap your concepts in, no matter how complicated you want to make it. Supervenience, norms, multiple realizability - all very worthwhile, I'm sure, for you to think about, but it doesn't change the simple criteria of determinism - if you are guaranteed the same output from the same input, then it's in the most plain straight forward way deterministic.

(I didn't get a share link when I asked before, so I just asked again. Slightly different response the second time around. https://chatgpt.com/share/67d28f66-d8b4-8002-893b-ebe19bc39430 )

The point I was trying to make is that it's not outlandish or an unfair manipulation of language when I say, the criteria of determinism is simple, it's simply, if you give it the same input you get the same output. If you start in the same state the next events happen the same too.

It doesn't matter what you want to tack on top. That criteria isn't concerned with any extra layers of analysis you'd like to do. You can do them, you can not do them, the simple criteria of determinism doesn't mind either way. If a system meets the criteria, then it's deterministic.

So if you believe free will exists in that system you described - that system where, given the same starting state you get the same events after - then as far as the logic in the op is concerned, you're not a libertarian, and it's not arguing against your idea of free will. You semantically think it is, because you call your idea "libertarian free will", and the article uses that same term too. But I personally wouldn't call your concept of free will presented here "libertarian". I would call it compatibilist. And you're right when you say it's not vulnerable to the intelligibility argument.

But if you do not mean the U, what do you mean? — tim wood

I dont even know what this question is asking. If "the U" is "the universe", then the universe already has a name - it's "the universe".

Determinism and indeterminism aren't possible names for the universe, they're names for possible descriptors of the universe.

And of course quantum influences are relevant to the topic of determinism. The nobel prize in physics for 2022 was won by a group of people making large advancements in testing Bell's Theorem, which at the very least rules out one particular (and very important) flavor of determinism. So QM is very very important to the question, "do we live in a universe that's deterministic?"

no. I'm not naming "the universe". I'm naming two categories of systems. One is named determinism. One is named indeterminism.

If this world is indeterministic in a quantum sense, or if it turns out this world is aligned more with one of the deterministic interpretations of qm, there's a difference, but in regards to human behaviour and free will, not a significant difference.

They still have different names. I don't personally feel the need to give them the same name just because the difference is insignificant in regards to human behaviour and free will. They're different enough to deserve different names.

follow up to my previous post, I wanted to ask an LLM just for fun. An LLM is of course not a replacement for a human expert or an individuals thought, but when it comes to how words are used i think they can at least have interesting insights. Perhaps this is interesting, perhaps not:

https://chatgpt.com/share/67d246ea-488c-8002-9544-35fd937426e2

But the ideas of causal inevitability of actions, or of their "[necessitation] by antecedent events and conditions together with the laws of nature", are usually justified by questionable inferences — Pierre-Normand

I have no idea why you think that doesn't apply to your view that it would always play out the same way. Whatever semantic distinction you're drawing between your view, that it would always play out the same way given the same conditions, and the statement "it's causally inevitable that they would play out the same way"... to me they're just the same thing. I don't see a difference.

Either everything would always play out the same way or it wouldn't. If it would, to me that's determinism. As far as I'm concerned that's all determinism means. Same input, same output.

If it were somehow possible to repeat a situation in which I made a certain choice and everything in that situation was exactly the same in every possible way, libertarian free will would entail that I could, this second time around, make a different choice. — Janus

Yeah, just wanted to add to this to make it explicitly, you would have to be perfectly the same too. But I think you already factored that in..

that is impossible, then libertarian free will cannot be the case, by definition. — Janus

It's actually not so much about it being impossible, but rather that it doesn't seem to give us free will in any meaningful sense if it is possible

It follows that that free will means simply 'acting according to one's nature'. Since we don't create ourselves, this seems the most sensible notion of free will: that is a compatibilist notion. — Janus

This does end up being my eventual conclusion, but isn't my immediate conclusion from the argument at hand. The immediate conclusion is just that incompatibilist notions of free will don't land for me.

"two names". I have no idea where this comes from.

If I have two employees, Sarah and Paul, and they have exactly the same skills at photography, and I need someone to take a photo, then with regard to that task there's no significant difference between Sarah and Paul. Of course I have two names for them though, they're two different people FFS. Should I call them the same name?

I have no idea where you're getting half that stuff from. "No significant difference", yes. Everything else, I don't know where you're getting everything else from. It isn't what I said and it doesn't follow from what I said.

why don't you just clarify your question? I clearly interpreted something wrong, how hard is it for you to just say what you meant?

I can't read? Isn't non-D. Maybe you can't write clearly.

To say that something is - D - and at the same time isn't - non-D - is what I call strange. Or odd, or illogical, or wrong — tim wood

Nothing strange illogical or wrong about something being D and not non-D at all. Double-negation leaves you with a positive. If it is "isn't non d", as you say, then it's D. Not not D means D - the nots cancel out.

why? What's strange about it?

right, and the reason, as far as I can tell, that your view doesn't have the intelligibility problem is because it actually isn't reliant on indeterminism at all. If you think it's perfectly fine to roll back the clock and see the exact same events play out every time, then you think it's perfectly fine to be in a deterministic universe. You have some unique semantic reason for calling your view "indeterminism" - it looks like that semantic reason revolves around the word "physical" for whatever reason - but I don't have any semantic reason to do the same, because I don't care about "physical". A system that evolves from the past to the future is either deterministic or not, and whether that system is "physical" or not is irrelevant. The system you described, where you roll back the clocks and everything happens the same, is the very definition of a deterministic system. That's what it means to be deterministic. Being deterministic has nothing to do with "physical", and everything to do with what you said would happen if you roll back the clocks.

So of course your view doesn't have the intelligibility problem. As far as the argument in OP is concerned, you don't have a libertarian view of free will.

you're asking me questions that don't matter to understand the thought experiment in question. They simply don't matter. They're as relevant as if you asked my favourite sandwich

This gets tiresome. You tell me. — tim wood

You criticized both me and the writer of the article for being vague, but you keep on saying completely unqualified statements that, without more specifics, are hard to judge. I don't hold free will to be that. What do you mean "are held to be"? They certainly aren't universally held to be what you said, so by whom?

I think you're reading stuff into it that isn't there. It doesn't say any of that explicitly, and I don't believe it says it implicitly either

Are D and non-D exhaustive of all possibilities? — tim wood

As far as functions go, or systems that evolve into the future, I believe so.

Free will, still undefined, is held to be possible only in a D world operating in a loosey-goosey way under some random influences. — tim wood

By whom?