The task given to the oracle doesn't make sense. The task given to the oracle is "predict the output of this Thw program, after you feed into the Thw program your prediction for the output of the Thw program."

It's recursive in a way that means the oracle can't even begin.

It's like me telling you, Tarski, I have a math problem for you: your job is to give me a number that's 2 more than the answer to this math problem.

Does that even make sense as a task?

There's no problem with this oracle being impossible in the first place, because of course it's impossible, the task itself is inherently recursively impossible.

You don't seem interested in trying to make yourself clear, in trying to develop a self-consistent vocabulary for your ideas. You end your post with "Sometimes it still works flawlessly. Sometimes, it doesn't." as if there's nothing at all you could do to clarify your ideas.

Maybe there's not, maybe you can't clarify your ideas.

and you don't seem to be trying much to disambiguate your incompatible vocabularies, making the arguments seem very non compelling as a whole.

When one definition of determinism is equivalent to "completeness", but then another definition allows you to say "incomplete determinism", and you put pretty close to 0 effort into explaining how that's supposed to make sense, I can't imagine I'm alone in just thinking it's all nonsense from that point on.

seems like you're mixing vocabularies a lot here and generating a lot of unnecessary ambiguity.

Yeah, if you say determinism means completeness, then "incomplete deterministic" just sounds like "incomplete completeness". Seems like a nosnense term to me.

Asserting incompatibilism, as a notion in metaphysics, translates into proving the impossibility of constructing an oracle, as a notion in computer science. It is effectively equivalent. — Tarskian

This is just factually untrue. You've got chaos theory which makes future-predicting oracles impossible, to start with.

with the notion of determinism equivalent to the notion of completeness — Tarskian

So then when you were talking about incomplete determinism, you were... what? What is that? An oxymoron? Nonsense? A contradiction? What is that?

I think your take is counter intuitive in some ways but not in a bad way, in an interesting and compelling way. Gonna chew on it a bit...

I don't think any of that goes any distance towards demonstrating what I said was incorrect. Incompatibilists say free will is incompatible with determinism, not oracles

I think you've invented your own special kind of incompatibilism here. If you ask an incompatibilist if they think free will is possible in a universe that is deterministic, but in which an oracle is impossible, I guarantee you 99%+ of incompatibilists will say "screw oracles, free will is incompatible with determinism period".

I don't think anything about the oracle or the thwarter says anything interesting about free will at all, personally, i think it's a red herring.

what is this incomplete determinism? I googled it but none of the results seemed like what you're talking about.

no, incompatibilism implies that if determinism is true, free will doesn't exist - but you explained yourself that this oracle can be impossible even if determinism is true, no?

So one can imagine a world where determinism is true, this oracle is impossible, and free will doesn't exist because determinism is true, regardless of this oracle.

I don't agree that free will has anything to do with oracle-like programs at all

ah my bad, didn't read the op carefully enough.

I really don't see that as free will in any meaningful sense.

you kind of contradict the first half of your post here with the second half. In the first half, you speak as if something being deterministic is basically synonyms with it being predictable, but in the second half you acknowledge that a chaotic system could be deterministic but unpredictable.

If a chaotic system can be deterministic but unpredictable, then you should be able to imagine software that is chaotic, and thus deterministic and unpredictable, no?

I think there's a subtly shifting meaning for the word "unpredictable" that's at play there.

You will never predict correctly what thwarter is going to do. — Tarskian

What makes you convinced thwarter is a genuinely possible program? Has anyone programmed one?

I am not sure I understand your algorithm and what probability distribution it gives to the integers — SophistiCat

There's a 50% chance that my algorithm ends with one digit. There's a 25% chance my algorithm ends with two digits. There's a 1/8 chance my algorithm ends with 3 digits. Etc. Each additional digit is another 50% chance of stopping there.

And each individual digit has 50% chance of being a 1 or a 0.

But it looks like you agree that there's a way to generate a random number without it being true that "all but a finite number of simple outcomes have probability zero.", which is what my algorithm was trying to illustrate

it's not

A -> (notB or B)

It's more like

A -> (notB and B)

But yes, it makes sense why that would imply not a. I think your Comms in this thread have just been a little too succinct, you're not filling in enough blanks for people to follow your logic, what point you're making, or even if you answered yes or no to the op poll question

I don't see the connection between what I said and what you're saying

what does that have to do with this stuff?

What do you think of this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbershop_paradox

Do you think Uncle Joe's argument is valid?

Maybe a little bit? I sort of believe in causal (or soft or whatever) determinism, but whether everything is causal (which it seems to be) is not actually as significant of a question as the others in the free will discussion. — Igitur

Sounds like compatibilism to me. If you think the question of free will is independent of the question "do we live in a deterministic universe", I consider that compatibilism.

I'm a compatibilist myself, I agree with a good deal of what you've said here.

good answer

I would ask someone who believes you don't have free will "What is stopping your will from being free? What is stopping you from making the choices you want to make? The fact that many factors determine the choice you will end up making?" — Igitur

I take it you're a compatibilist?

A lot of people don't intuit, for various reasons, a compatibilist take on free will, so for those people, the thing stopping them is, I guess, the fact (they would believe it's a fact, anyway, whether they're right or wrong) that their actions are the consequence of things like "physics" happening - things which their will has no control over.

I think you can develop an algorithm that gives all integers (without limit) SOME probability of happening. You just can't develop an algorithm that (a) terminates, and (b) gives them all equal probability.

I can try to give you an example of "an algorithm that gives all integers (without limit) SOME probability of happening" if you like.

edit. I'll just give it now, I just thought of one.

The algorithm is to produce a number in binary. Every step involves 2 flips.

flip 1: determine if the digit you're on should be a 0 or a 1, heads is 1, tails is 0.

flip 2: determine if you should STOP or generate another digit - heads means generate another digit, tails means stop.

so your first flip, you do Heads, so
1.
your next flip, you do Heads, so flip another.
your next flip, you do Tails, so
01.
your next flip, you do Heads, so flip another.
next flip is heads, so
101.
next flip is Tails, so stop.

final number in binary is 101, converted from binary to decimal is
5

This algorithm is theoretically capable of randomly producing ANY of the infinite sequence of integers, but it preferentially chooses lower numbers.

I just had a train of thought I thought might be vaguely interesting:

1. With an infinite number of options, not all options can have equal probability.

2. As far as I can tell, most non-equal-probability algorithms for selecting a number preferentially choose numbers on the "smaller" side of things.

3. Thus, if you want to decrease the chance of someone randomly selecting your number (and we can assume, I guess, that these universes are numbered), choose a bigger number! As big as you can!

Universe 723645283928374827364817354871263498172736498712736481239 will be less likely to be randomly guessed than 100, given an infinite number of choices, I think.

Obviously there are some algorithms for selecting 723645283928374827364817354871263498172736498712736481239 more frequently than 100, but those algorithms are less likely to be the algorithm chosen, compared to an algorithm which makes 100 more likely.

(the above isn't a proof or a known fact, just an idea I intuit)

I feel like this is perhaps the area of philosophy most rife with confusion. How exactly would "undetermined" actions be free? If a choice is "determined by nothing" then it is essentially arbitrary and random and in no sense would such a choice be "ours." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Couldn't agree more

Seems to me I can control what I can or can’t do or decide to do or not do in the future. For example I did not shoplift today … does this mean I have a choice over my actions or is this merely an illusion? — kindred

If you chose to not shoplift today, did you have an explicit thought process that led to that choice?

I feel like the second option should have an answer of "kinda" haha. There are different types of idealism that mean actually kind of opposing things. For example, what if I don't believe that minds create reality, but I do believe that physics is a manifestation of the multiverse iterating over mathematical objects?

I've been told that that's a type of idealism, so... kinda?

that's right, islamic doctrine is philosophically lifeless

good thing Islam isn't replying to me in this forum then

I really could not care less what Islamic doctrine says

no problem, reads better now


You say "due to norms". You think it's only norms that make the second argument more agreeable? What do you mean by "norms" there? Do you mean due to completely arbitrary cultural values?

But it turns on how intuitive 1 ) is in the second argument vs how intuitive 1 ) is in the first argument. — fdrake

What does this mean? It turnsout how intuitive 1 is in the second vs how intuitive 1 is in the first is what? It doesn't feel like you finished your sentence.

Inescapable suffering that makes any joy in life impossible seems like a valid reason to me.

Free from what? Other than our awareness of the whole thing, which a boulder lacks, in what way is a path taken for such causes by a person who comes to an intersection different from a path taken by a boulder rolling down a mountain? — Patterner

Umm... you answered the question yourself: our awareness of the whole thing. That's it. — ssu

For the sake of argument, if one imagines a human mind as a "decision-making machine", then the freedom of the will is "free to act on the desires and decisions of that machine", in particular as opposed to "forced to act on the desires and decisions of other machines.

Yes, that's a classic example of what dictionaries can do, otherwise known as a circular definition. I believe it is somewhat frowned upon in philosophical circles. Fortunately, we are free to disagree with a dictionary, even if we have to be a bit cautious about it. It doesn't make it easier to articulate what's going on here. — Ludwig V

Expecting more of a dictionary would be a mistake. A dictionary is limited to describing words with other words - there's inevitable circularity to it. There's something of a Munchausen Trilemma involved in writing a book full of words describing other words.

"they performed the same modeling techniques under different labels." - this sounds like you're saying "the model of relativity is just the model of Newtonian mechanics, under a different name." Is that not what you mean?

Newtonian mechanics didn't die by virtue of disproof. The old guard died off and the new crowd thought the previous thinking was too 'antiquated' while they performed the same modeling techniques under different labels. — substantivalism

That's not remotely true, that's a completely bonkers narrative that I would expect only from a flat earther.

Since we're talking pragmatics here, hypotheticals have to be subject to this same pragmatic analysis. That is, has there really been a case where an ugly woman was thrown out of a women's restroom because someone thought them to be a man? Is this really happening? — Hanover

Yes, there have been masculine-looking women harassed for going into womens toilets.

https://www.vox.com/2016/5/18/11690234/women-bathrooms-harassment

It's not a hypothetical, it's already happening. And a reasonable person would expect that to happen - androgynous-looking women are not that uncommon. If the only criteria you have to go on to decide if you want to harass someone for going into the wrong bathroom is how they look, a reasonable person with knowledge about the world should expect that people will get it wrong sometimes.