That was a nice presentation and an interesting discussion. Thanks for putting in the effort!

I was thinking about what you said about the asymmetry of boundary conditions, e.g.

This does not put time and space on equal footing. The solution requires knowledge of u at one time and two places. These are generally derived from physical considerations, e.g. where the electron wavefunction must vanish: two positions where the wavefunction is zero at one time: generally the start. — Kenosha Kid

[The relativistic wavefunction] puts time and space on equal footing (both energy and momentum are squared), requiring knowledge of the particle at two times, not just one. This is why in relativistic quantum theories, we do not proceed by specifying an initial state, time-evolving it forward, and asking the probability of spontaneously collapsing to a particular final state. Rather, we have to specify the initial and final states first, then ask what the probability is. — Kenosha Kid

The true boundary conditions — Kenosha Kid

Mathematically, of course, any consistent set of boundary conditions is on equal footing with any other. And in any case, rather than solving a boundary value problem by time-evolving a wavefunction (forward and/or backwards), we can equivalently solve a least action problem, which obviates the question of where to start and where to end, since we are doing it everywhere at once. Which makes me wonder about the physical significance of all this, and particularly your main take-away about determinism.

The "trick" of putting some of the boundary conditions ahead in time makes the point a rather trivial one. Another way to state it would be to note that if there is a fact of the matter about the way the world is going to be at some future time, then there is nothing indeterminate about it. Well, of course.


I am also going to take a little issue with this:

This idea of the absolute square is important. It is how we get from the non-physical wavefunction to a real thing, even as abstract as probability. Why is the wavefunction non-physical? Because it has real and imaginary components: u = Re{u} + i*Im{u}, and nothing observed in nature has this feature. The absolute square of the wavefunction is real, and is obtained by multiplying the wavefunction by its complex conjugate u* = Re{u} - i*Im{u} (note the minus sign). Remembering that i*i = -1, you can see for yourself this is real. We'll come back to this. — Kenosha Kid

I wouldn't agree with the statement that the wavefunction is non-physical because it has a complex component. We can represent uncontroversially real entities with complex functions, as you are no doubt aware (e.g. the electromagnetic field in classical electrodynamics, and generally any 2D model where complex representation is expedient). Perhaps your thinking here is prompted by the QM formalism of observables - linear operators that, when applied to the wavefunction, produce real values that correspond to measurements (of position, momentum, and other attributes of a quantum state). But if only measurements are real, then nothing about the wavefunction as such is real, not even its absolute square: a probability density is not a measurement.

Anyway, this is probably a diversion (or not - you tell me). I myself don't regard the question of what there is as important. I take a theory as a whole, with all its ontological furniture, as real (enough) to the extent that it does a good (enough) job.

We get attached to our beliefs - that's the main reason we hang on to them in the first place, regardless of their epistemic virtues or lack thereof. We rarely question what we are long used to hold true, and when we do for the sake of form, we rarely admit actual doubt into our hearts. Still, our noetic structures are not impregnable fortresses, and every once in a while a secure belief begins to crumble. But it won't go easily. Unlike logical systems, our minds are not so brittle - they can tolerate some amount of inconsistency.

@Baden I concur with the crackpot.

The latest Times investigation into the president’s tax data and other records found that more than 200 companies, special-interest groups and foreign governments had patronized Mr. Trump’s properties, funneling in millions of dollars, while reaping benefits from him and his administration.

“As president, Mr. Trump built a system of direct presidential influence-peddling unrivaled in modern American politics,” writes an investigative team that has been covering the president’s finances and taxes for almost four years. — New York Times

Key Findings

Orbitals are distributions, charge density clouds. They are smeared across the entire universe, but their density peaks in the vicinity of the nucleus, and away from its maxima it rapidly decays to almost nothing.



In any case, this doesn't say anything about measurement.

I've not heard of this, do you have any names or reading to suggest? — Isaac

Here is one representative (I think - I am no kind of expert) example, with some thoughts on x-phi: Joshua Shepherd, The Folk Psychological Roots of Free Will (2017). This paper has a larger survey of recent experimental work: Esthelle Ewusi-Boisvert, Eric Racine, A Critical Review of Methodologies and Results in Recent Research on Belief in Free Will (2018).

In retrospect, I think you are right that determinism is neither here nor there in the issue of moral responsibility and free will. — Olivier5

It is relevant to the extent that the starting point for Strawson's thesis is the old debate on the compatibility of personal responsibility/free will with determinism. But he argues that indeterminism is no better than determinism in this respect. He is looking for "ultimate" responsibility in a reductive sense; with this framing a person can never be "ultimately" responsible, because the buck will always pass to something else (because he already prejudged that it should!) - whether it is a prior state of the universe + deterministic dynamics or chance events.


Responding in the thread while claiming not to be involved is a performative contradiction :razz: You have no obligation to respond just because you are mentioned, but there's no need to be rude.

Indeed, and 'complicated' is certainly right, but is it that you think such a notion of free-choice need be abandoned for that reason? Or are you more in favour of rolling up one's sleeves and getting stuck in nonetheless? — Isaac

It depends on what one expects the result of such an inquiry to look like. Moral philosophers traditionally tend to look for simple, universal principles in a theory, modeling it, more-or-less, on fundamental physics. I am skeptical that such simple, exceptionless organizing principles could underlie most humanistic notions, such as responsibility or freedom, so to me the more obvious approach would be more in the line of stamp collecting than grand theorizing. This approach is characteristic of the relatively new field of experimental philosophy ("x-phi"), which uses the methods of sociology and experimental psychology to study "free will" and such as aspects of human attitudes and behavior, and then offers modest generalizations that do not go too far beyond the available evidence.

I'm sometimes required to help plead for judicial leniency on the grounds of a person's upbringing or environment. The basis for such action is that somewhere in this muddle we (those involved at the time) can agree that such influences were outside of the person's preferred choices. — Isaac

Oh, interesting. Yes, that's just the sort of example that I had in mind (and how such attitudes can vary, change, be contested, etc.)

I was going to respond, but I see that this thread has since been taken over by an argument that spilled over from elsewhere. An object lesson of a failure of online discourse, I suppose.

This guy already joined this forum and posted his video a little while back. But I agree, such appeals are pointless and have never had any actual impact.

I wasn't so much complaining about a derail. It just seems that you (or maybe just Olivier) are itching to have this discussion - so why not have a dedicated topic for it? That would invite wider participation.

Can one of you guys start a thread on determinism/indeterminism, instead of hijacking other threads? (I have the damnedest time making OPs, but I might contribute if there is one.)

What intrigues me is the expression "what we've been talking about all this time is not what we thought it was". I'm afraid I can't quite make sense of this. A word has to mean what we (community of language users) think it means doesn't it? Could you perhaps rephrase? — Isaac

I was thinking of folk theories, as in folk physics or folk theory of mind - intuitive or conditioned but unschooled understanding of how some aspect of the world works. Such folk theories have a deeper purchase on how we think and interact than just language (if indeed language is just language). And a name like free will can stand in for such a folk theory.

That's not to say that folk theories are inherently deficient. For example, when it comes to moral responsibility (and, to an extent, free will, although as I noted, here things are more muddled), my position is that a "folk theory" is all there is to it. It is just what we personally and popularly believe it is - there isn't anything deeper or truer than that. (Sure, we could look into psychological, sociological, evolutionary, etc. explanations, but those would be explanations of how we historically came to have these particular beliefs about moral responsibility, rather than a better understanding of what moral responsibility really is or should be.)

But for other things - physics, mind - we can indeed gain a better understanding than what we can learn by consulting our intuitions or popular beliefs.

What really matters morally is the difference between having one's actions driven by desires an thoughts one considers one's own, and having one's hand forced by the unwanted desires of others, or desires and thoughts one does not consider one's own (psycho-pathology). All of this can be dealt with without having to send a single electron through any slits! We just don't need to know, in most cases, anything about ultimate cause, we only need go a few steps back and see if such causes are still within or outside of what we consider ourselves. — Isaac

This is where things get complicated. What we hold an individual to be accountable for vs. what we consider to be an external cause can vary quite a bit. Strawson stakes out an extreme position where everything is caused externally, deprecating personal responsibility. No one (outside of philosophy) actually does that, of course, but there is still a lot of variability and inconsistency here. Answers can vary by culture, by individual, and even by how the question is asked or primed. For example, how much does one's upbringing matter? Life experiences? Genetics? Family, nation, race? Do you leave them outside the personal boundary as external causes/influences or not?

You could just put a link to your blog in your profile, as others do, instead of billboarding it on your user name.

Yeah, I can't really stand "...therefore X doesn't exist" conclusions (where X is some common feature of our language). I think, 'well what on earth have we all been talking about all this time then?'. — Isaac

Sometimes you may want to conclude that what we've been talking about all this time is not what we thought it was, or that it's just not a well-formed concept, and we may be better off leaving it alone than trying to precisify it with philosophy. I've been drifting towards such a conclusion with respect to free will, especially after looking at some sociological research.

My previous position was to treat free will as something that is real, insofar as people treat it as real: they refer to it, they evaluate their and other people's behavior based on whether they think they exercised their free will. They even appeal to it in a court of law. But it seems that, going by the actual use, the concept of free will is heterogeneous and inconsistent. More importantly, those aspects of free will that matter to us - responsibility being foremost - can be dealt with on their own, with no reference to free will. That is, if you want to consider whether we are morally responsible in such and such circumstances (e.g. when our actions are physically determined by an earlier state of the universe), why not just talk about that? Why confuse matters by bringing up something that no one is quite sure about?

It should be said that in The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility paper and some other related works Strawson does specifically talk about moral responsibility, rather than free will. And he starts his entry on Free Will in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy with these words:

‘Free will’ is the conventional name of a topic that is best discussed without reference to the will. It is a topic in metaphysics and ethics as much as in the philosophy of mind. Its central questions are ‘What is it to act (or choose) freely?’, and ‘What is it to be morally responsible for one’s actions (or choices)?’ These two questions are closely connected, for it seems clear that freedom of action is a necessary condition of moral responsibility, even if it is not sufficient. — Strawson, RET

In the rest of the article he mainly talks about the second question, i.e. the question of moral responsibility.

Where is the university? All you've shown me are buildings and grounds and students and faculty and books and equipment. Where in all of that is the university you promised to show me? — Pfhorrest

This went right over his head, I am afraid.

LOL Radin. I knew that he was a crackpot, but that was more from the way reasoned more than anything else. Makes sense though.

It's a common knowledge that Newton's predominant interests throughout his life (judging by the expenditure of time and ink) were esoteric religious studies and alchemy, and that he was a rare jerk.

If that's your trump card in support of your confused OP, I think you should quit while you're ahead.

Another apriorist giving this dead horse yet another beating.

It's the biggest FRAUD in history!!!

I experience, personally, a capacity to choose options at random. — Olivier5

Making truly random choices is notoriously difficult - ask a poker player. There are common situations in poker where random choices are considered to be an optimal strategy. Experienced players sometimes use props, such as a digital watch, to help them randomize their choices, because otherwise an opponent can pick up on a hidden bias and exploit it.

Santorum saying the quiet part loud. — StreetlightX

Life imitates outdoes The Onion.

Same day:

Stunned Pundits Criticize Trump For Refusing To Denounce His Base

CLEVELAND—After failing to condemn the group’s violent behavior and rhetoric during the first presidential debate, President Donald Trump came under fire from stunned political pundits Wednesday for refusing to denounce his base. “I’ve been reporting on these debates for decades, and frankly, I don’t know what the president was thinking when he declined to clearly and openly disavow thousands of violent, radicalized people who his reelection dearly depends on,” said ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, who, along with flabbergasted pundits from CNN, MSNBC, and CBS, noted that the president had several opportunities to distance himself from the people upon which his entire image, campaign, and presidency relied, and yet ignored them all. “How can Trump, as the sitting president, get away with this type of behavior that he’s totally normalized at every turn? It really shouldn’t be that hard for him to look at the camera, say their names, and then denounce his stalwart supporters whose votes are crucial for an election victory.” At press time, political pundits blasted Democratic candidate Joe Biden for refusing to explicitly denounce the extreme pro-Green New Deal rhetoric on the left. — The Onion, Wednesday 12:35PM

Yeah, he doesn't actually define responsibility, except in a negative way, so this was a bit of extrapolation on my part. I suppose if Strawson was a theist, then he would have to say that God is the only one responsible. Since he is not, his conclusion literally is: The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility.

Rather, we'd work out what it is we still mean by 'responsible' despite determinism. — Isaac

That would be a very different approach indeed (and one that I would endorse): start from the commonsense assumption that there is such a thing as moral responsibility, then work out what it is. Strawson, on the contrary, comes with presuppositions of what moral responsibility is, or rather what it cannot be, and then asks whether we can have it.

There is something that Strawson is saying with his argument. He apparently believes that the only thing that can bear the "ultimate" responsibility is that which is itself uncaused (but not random/chancy). He considers a person in that role and concludes that the role doesn't fit, because a person is just a transient state in the causal chain. This is an argument, though perhaps not a very good one.

This is because for him the buck doesn't stop at the self. He doesn't actually give an account of personal identity, because it is irrelevant to his concept of will/responsibility. He only refers to 'one' as a shorthand indicating the person qua physical or mental state at some point of time, but he places that state in the middle of a causal chain and says that because of this middle position, it cannot bear the ultimate responsibility.

Well, the neural network and the full connectome of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans have been fully mapped. Simulating this neural network produces an identical response to different experiments when compared to a biological worm. If we are able to do this for our own brains we can expect similar results. But C. legans has only 302 neurons, orders of magnitude less than humans and the network complexity doesnot even come close. However, it is possible and hopefully we will be able to achieve this. — debd

Sure, but can this technology scale up many orders of magnitude to simulate human brain? And just as importantly, is such a neural net simulation fully adequate? It may reproduce some behavior, modulo time scaling factor, but not so as to make the simulation indistinguishable from the real thing - both from outside and from inside (of course, the latter would be difficult if not impossible to check).

I am not committed to this view though - just staking out a possibility.

I wonder if functionalism with respect to the mind in general might fail for a similarly banal reason? Might we be overly optimistic in assuming that we can always replicate the mind's (supposed) functional architecture in some technology other than the wetware that we actually possess? What if this wetware is as good as one can do in this universe? We might be able to do better in particular tasks - indeed, we already do with computers that perform many tasks much better than people can do in their heads. But, even setting aside the qualia controversy, it is a fact that nothing presently comes close to replicating the mind's function just as it is in actual humans, in all its noisy, messy reality. What if it can't even be done, other than the usual way?

Trump's taxes and business ventures: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/29/podcasts/the-daily/donald-trump-taxes-investigation.html

We’ve now looked at almost 30 or 40 years of Donald Trump’s tax returns and his financial records, analyzed his inheritance. This wellspring that came from “The Apprentice” — that’s an amount of income unlike anything he experienced in any other aspect of his life.

It sounds like a big thing you’re learning is that when it comes to the kinds of deals in which somebody else borrows the Trump name and uses it, Donald Trump is swimming in money, but when it comes to a business that he buys and tries to operate, like a big golf course, those become big financial black holes.

The less decision-making authority Donald Trump has on a business, the more money that business is going to make. And the more he’s involved in designing a business, setting it up and creating a business plan, the more likely it is to have trouble. — NYT

In a way, Strawson's argument is the opposite of the Gem: instead of "My will is my will, therefore..." it is "My will is not my will, therefore I am not responsible." Which would actually be reasonable, if he could give a convincing argument. And his argument isn't all bad, but it is too limited and oblivious to reality.

There is something analogous here, but I wouldn't say it's the same thing. Strawson capitalizes on the so-called sourcehood criterion of free will: for a decision to be free, it has to be your decision, you have to be its originator. This is fair, generally speaking; there isn't an inherent fallacy in this criterion (unlike in Stove's Worst Argument). Sociological research shows that this criterion indeed forms part of what people commonly mean by "free will," and philosophers too usually give it its due.

Where Strawson's argument can be criticized is in how he caches out this sourcehood. Strawson in effect identifies sourcehood with causality. His theses is that in order for you to be responsible for your decision, you have to be its ultimate causal source. He then argues that since you are just an intermediate element in the causal chain (this isn't exactly his argument, but it can be restated this way), then you cannot be ultimately responsible.

This identification of responsibility with causality is, again, not entirely unreasonable. What I think makes Strawson's argument bad, and not just flawed or mistaken, is that he takes this framing of sourcehood for granted, without any reflection and argument (at least that was my impression from his oft-cited paper The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility). This also characterizes most free will discussions on the 'net (including this very thread), where people plunge into arguments without bothering to do any philosophical groundwork, without asking questions that need to be asked, and often just talk past each other.

For my part, I am not really paying attention to this pompous ass, but there is not reason why we can't discuss analytical philosophy or the value of philosophy.

I take your point that as any pursuit that depends largely on public support, philosophy has a burden of justifying its existence. But as I think you agree, this question should not be considered transactionally, but in the wider context of the value of learning. (After all, philosophy is not much different in this respect from many of our other pursuits, and not only academic.)

But I want to stress that value here does not have to be a measurable material value. We don't support philosophy in the hopes of possibly getting Velcro or strong encryption out of it somewhere down the road. This is value in a broader axiological sense.

I feel bad sometimes for studying philosophy. Other fields are focusing on actual problems like how to stop COVID or how to help countries with serious economic problems while philosophers shut them selves off from the outside world to go play in their own heads or provide extensive commentary on a long dead philosopher that no one cares to read and often requires a second language to fully understand. — BitconnectCarlos

Well, this is true for a lot of academic disciplines, both in humanities and in physical sciences.

One has to wonder about the complicity of this middle-management demand for 'value'. — StreetlightX

Exactly. This demand for (whatever) philosophy to justify itself in terms of its measurable value to society ought to be resisted.

I think (as you correctly point out) it's all about motivation. If your immediate response to a new idea is, that you are obviously right and there's no value to that new idea, then it's very easy to point out irrelevant contradictory technicalities or to even willfully misunderstand the proponent. — Hirnstoff

Likewise, if your response to any push-back is that you are obviously right and there's no value to a different view, then it is very easy to come up with ad hominem excuses for why the opponent can be dismissed outright. For example, psychoanalyze them and conclude that the only reason they are contradicting you is that they are "craving the Gotcha Game experience." After that you don't have to listen to anything they say and you can still feel good and smug.

Should we only believe in what is verifiable? — petrichor

Obviously not. Most of the things that we hold as true are not verifiable in practice or even in theory.

How would we know? — petrichor

If you were consistent in your skepticism, you would eventually arrive at solipsism, thus undermining all your empirical reasoning up to that point. This is a dead end.

Another issue is that the contents of a computer's mind (if it has one) are immune from discovery using scientific methods. The only access to knowledge of computer mental states would be through first-person computer accounts, the reliability of which would be impossible to verify. Whether machines are conscious will forever be a mystery. This suggests that consciousness is unlike all other physical properties. — RogueAI

How is this issue different from not having a first-person experience of another person's consciousness? Unless your real issue is that it's a computer rather than a person - but that is the same issue that Chinese Room-type thought experiments try to capitalize on (confusingly, in my opinion).

In A nice derangement of epitaphs Davidson argues that language is not algorithmic.

Searle is arguing much the same thing with the Chinese room. — Banno

I think Searle's thought experiment was rather a reaction to reductive takes on consciousness, particularly computational, functionalist ones:

I think that consciousness or understanding or perception at a particular point of time is the function of the structural and physiological state of the neuronal network at that point in time. — debd

Now consider the room to be our brain and the person is replaced by a chain of neurons. — debd

There are other variants of the thought experiment that are an even better fit for this, such as Ned Block's Chinese Nation thought experiment, where a large group of people performs a neural network computation simply by calling a list of phone numbers. The counterintuitive result here is that a functionalist would have to say that the entire system thinks, understands language, feels pain, etc. - whatever it is that it is functionally simulating - even though it is very hard to conceive of e.g. the Chinese nation as a single conscious entity.

But I think this people-as-computer-parts gimmick is a red herring. Of course a part of a system is not equivalent to the entire system - that was never in contention. A wheel spoke is not a bicycle either. The real contention here is whether something that is not a person - a computer, for example - can have a functional equivalent of consciousness.

Whenever I hear about those that study psychics, telepathy, remote viewing, and the like it is usually some specialized group that studies nothing else — TiredThinker

Well, that is generally true of specialists. You will find the same with black holes or medieval French literature.

But as for your general question, there has been a fair bit of non-crank research into some areas with paranormal associations, such as near-death experiences. It depends on the character of the claim, how conducive it is to scientific study.

Analytic philosophy, I think, hasn't really been a thing for some time now. — Srap Tasmaner

Was it ever a thing? Is "analytic philosophy" a meaningful and useful designation? I think philosophers tend to answer in the negative. (And the same with "continental philosophy.")

If conjunction and disjunction (∨ and ∧) are interpreted differently than in classical logic, then it does not seem so surprising that the principle of distributivity might fail. But this does not entail that the principle does not hold universally. The principle does hold universally (it seems to me) so long as we interpret the conjunction and and disjunction symbols (and whatever other symbols might also be relevant) to mean what they mean in classical logic. If we change their meanings, then it makes (classically) logical sense that we'd get a different set of theorems. — Dusty of Sky

If you identify logic with classical logic, or something with a close family resemblance, then yes. But formal logic in general is less specific than classical logic, even though it still has to do with reasoning, with inference. Which is to say that the patterns of reasoning that are available to us go beyond those that are covered by classical logic. With this general sense of logic, it is indeed possible to have a logic in which conjunction and disjunction mean something different than what they mean in classical logic, but play broadly similar roles. Perhaps the example on pp. 12-13 will help to illustrate the point, though admittedly, taken in isolation it may not look very convincing.

But I admit that much of what I read in the introduction went over my head. — Dusty of Sky

Yeah, I am out of my depth here as well. Perhaps one of our resident mathematicians will come along and enlighten us :)