Causal determinism?

[bumab]

Is the ever increasing body of knowledge about the natural world preclude on free will? Not in the religious sense, but as we move more and more towards a world where everything can be predicted if you know the starting conditions, does that begin to affect personal responsibility?

 

QM aside, I've heard many people talking about how personal responsibility is giving way to causal determinism- i.e. my genes made me do it, or more fundamentally, the way my molocules are arranged made me do it. It seems physics and science in general is reaching a point where the human being becomes simply a machine, responding to impulses set in motion long before we ever got here.

 

Is that the future of science? Seems so to me, or at least it seems like the inevitable target for scientific research into things of this nature. Do you all think science is begining to push "personal responsibility" out of the way?

[alxian]

no

 

only if you can know where everything s which is impossile. causality is one of those those things that may exist but given its inherent impossible to exploit nature it hardly matters that everything could theoretically be predicted, the universe is far too vast and fluid

[pgrmdave]

http://www.hypography.com/scienceforums/showthread.php?t=1027&page=1

Determinism vs. Freewill

 

http://www.hypography.com/scienceforums/showthread.php?t=1293

Responsibility Within Determinism

 

These threads are similar, I think, and may provide some ideas.

[zadojla]

I think you've conflated two different things:

 

Science of various sorts is finding out very much more detail on why people might be susceptible to certain things, but this is generally expressed as a probability. A woman's mother and two sisters may have breast cancer, so she has a genetic disposition to get it, with about 30-40% likelyhood. A person who was abused as a child is more likely to be an abuser, not certain to be an abuser. This is not determinism in the usual sense.

 

However, there is a tendency in this culture (USA) to try to get out of trouble by appealing to these probabilities as an excuse, or extenuation. This is just an understandable effort to avoid punishment for an action. That doesn't mean we should allow it, just as we don't allow our children to blame each other, or an imaginary friend, for a trangression.

[sanctus]

As long as we cannot predict every action of every human (which if you believe as I do in determinism, it's just cause to our lack of knowledge and the absence of super-computers), personal responsibilty stays here. Once we can predict every action we are "enslaved" by the computer who tells us our actions, as he knows when one willl have to be stopped or just what action he has to do so that the one who would have done something bad won't do it anymore.

[Tormod]

Once we can predict every action we are "enslaved" by the computer who tells us our actions, as he knows when one willl have to be stopped or just what action he has to do so that the one who would have done something bad won't do it anymore.

 

Are you just trying to hide your faith, Sanctus? ;)

[alxian]

bah, even if determisnism works we will not be enslaved

 

that is the nature of free will and the bane of seers prophets and psychics

 

humans have the damnable ability to think about what they are told and act in unpredictable ways.

 

simple solution to that is make a prophecy about someone based on your computer projection and dont tell the person.. and do not observe the steps to its completion (the watched pot...).

 

even if you can tell where every particle is likely to go, you will never be able to with absolute certainty say where every particle can go. a person hearing a prophecy of his demise will avoid it at all costs, hollywood says this over reaction will cause his demise. but a careful person will continue to be careful.

 

thus determinism based on super computers will only as literature will tell you a prejection of possible outcomes. where the human will deside what actions to take based on that information.

 

even if the projection seems absolute only by being extremely general will it be succesful in predicting anything. if you are trying to project something extremely precise a far way off in the future good luck to you and your mighty machine for in our world there are far too many variables to take into account. the least of which could be an irritation from a fallen hair rather than a blinding sweat bead in the eye that could cause you to stop on the sidewalk and not walk in front of that bus.

 

but its fun to think anything that complex can be calculated.. mainly because it would be required to generate believable VR worlds.. (the current techniques are very underwhelming)

[alxian]

A COUNTRY WITHOUT AN ARMY IS LIKE A FISH WITHOUT A BIKE!!

 

especially if that fish in in the middle of the highway and likely to be run over at any moment by other countries with semitrucks (armies)

 

at least with a tricycle pointed in the right direction it could maybe roll off the highway (hopefully to a nearby pond)

[TINNY]

bah, even if determisnism works we will not be enslaved

 

that is the nature of free will and the bane of seers prophets and psychics

 

humans have the damnable ability to think about what they are told and act in unpredictable ways.

The problem of consciousness has been a mysterious one. I read a book titled 'Are we unique?' by James Trefil about the problem of consiousness. The author gave a few possible conjectures and opts for a materialist outlook like you guys so far have. The question is ' how can a robot be self-aware?' or something like that I can't remember. Because unexplained events in the past have slowly been uncovered and explained, there's no reason that science cannot explain consciousness in the future. That's his POV.

 

even if you can tell where every particle is likely to go, you will never be able to with absolute certainty say where every particle can go. a person hearing a prophecy of his demise will avoid it at all costs, hollywood says this over reaction will cause his demise. but a careful person will continue to be careful.

so what. all that is still determined if determinism is true. No need to be responsible. Just imagine a robot being guilty of doing something when in fact the robot is hisself preprogrammed and determined by the software programmer.

 

even if the projection seems absolute only by being extremely general will it be succesful in predicting anything. if you are trying to project something extremely precise a far way off in the future good luck to you and your mighty machine for in our world there are far too many variables to take into account. the least of which could be an irritation from a fallen hair rather than a blinding sweat bead in the eye that could cause you to stop on the sidewalk and not walk in front of that bus.

this is not the issue. It is whether there should be any responsibility on us if we can't do anything about it and we are not the ones who made the choice on free will.

 

now, what about QM?

[sanctus]

Are you just trying to hide your faith, Sanctus? :)

But such a computer would have all the prerequisits of a god!

[sanctus]

Very nice answer. :)

But have you already seen a fish using pedals?

[sanctus]

Alxian,

you didn't take in account one thing I said, that is I believe in determinism (ie if we would now all the variables we could predict the future with 100% right answers), if you start from the fact that free will exists there is nothing to critic about your answer.

 

But I agree such a computer will not likely ever exist.

[bumab]

As long as we cannot predict every action of every human (which if you believe as I do in determinism, it's just cause to our lack of knowledge and the absence of super-computers), personal responsibilty stays here.

 

I don't see how that works. Given everything can be predicted solely with mathamatics, as I think you are getting at, I don't see how free will is preserved (I am equating free will with personal responsibility). In a deterministic world, you CANNOT BUT do what is in your future, whether it's predicted or not. Now, this is not to discount the possibility of predeterminism, which simply means you WILL do something in the future- that doesn't mean you could not do something else. When you get into the mechanistic view of pure determinism, you MUST do something. It's like 2 + 2 MUST equal 4.

 

I'm not condeming that view, however. But I wonder about the implications on a social and philisophical level of a deterministic universe. Science seems to rely on that as a fundamental assumption. Ok, so what's the cost of losing free will? I can't wait until somebody starts using that argument in court... "my molocules made me do it!" or something like that :)

 

Or perhaps I'm just not seeing how a deterministic world jives with personal responbsibility.

[alxian]

that is why i dismissed the possibility of such a machine.

 

but that a human with enough brain power could potentially predict events rather than projections based on subquatum level determinism.

 

because simply put nothing (or very little) actually is influenced but quantum physics. all of the things that occur in the larger world can be attributed to larger things than how many atoms make up a person. furthermore for acurate predictions you need to account for the decisions people make, people being simple and routine based thats again much simpler to calculate for a person than a machine.

 

thus determinism will be achieved at some point by larger brained animals with better communication tools than we have (such as ultrasonic telepathy like i mentioned in another thread), than by computers running numbers for weeks at a time (the data will become stale before anything of value comes out.

 

i'll point out though that police departments have developed a crime prediction machine that works fairly well. i.e. a machine predicting a precise thing for a precise time in the furture. but they do still have a fair enough margin of error and are not looking for a precise answer either just statistics, like which stores to post more guards at during what times of the year.

[bumab]

especially if that fish in in the middle of the highway and likely to be run over at any moment by other countries with semitrucks (armies)

 

at least with a tricycle pointed in the right direction it could maybe roll off the highway (hopefully to a nearby pond)

 

and that's really funny! :)

[sanctus]

bumab, I make a difference between free will and personal responsibilty, simply because as long as we live in illusion to have free will, we have personal responsibilty.

 

And just a thought, even if all our actions are already programmed by our molecules (and the ones of the universe) we still have personal responsibility, as we are the programmed molecules that executed the program..... yes I know it doesn't really hold, but...

[bumab]

I make a difference between free will and personal responsibilty, simply because as long as we live in illusion to have free will, we have personal responsibilty.

 

Yeah, I see your point. I'm thinking though that as the world moves towards a more scientific worldview, with all it's deterministic consequences, how long will we live in that illusion (if it is an illusion).

 

I think if free will does exist, then there are some pretty big, new questions for science to look into! If not... uh, business as usual I guess :)