The HN crowd from my impression wants to deeply think of themselves as being in control of how their life transpired. I'm an outlier and I think free will is an illusion. Not only do I think everything is fated beyond our control but I have the belief that society would function better if people were educated young about understanding the concept of determinism and why we don't have control over how life transpires. Fundamentally we're living in a judgement & punishment system of society because religion adopted the stance of people being in control instead of what we describe as evil being a product of God. I think a society that replaces judgement & punishment with rehabilitation would be fundamentally just. I'm curious if society will evolve or stay unchanging but I think it likely won't be in my lifetime.
> Not only do I think everything is fated beyond our control but I have the belief that society would function better if people were educated young about understanding the concept of determinism and why we don't have control over how life transpires
We can’t really decide to do that because we don’t have the free will for it. Preordained fate has decreed for there to be no such education.
I mean, you argument appears self-defeating to me. Is it not?
"decide" is not incompatible with determinism, it just means the decision will always be the same. We all make decisions every day, they just aren't free.
So in this case, it has all been determined that we do not have the education currently, but that says nothing of what the future is determined to be.
I am certainly not holding my breath for society to bite the bullet and accept this. The only way I could see any kind of transformation happening (in the US, at least) is if the sitting president were to physically say "Free will is not a thing, and because of that I'm implementing these reformations". I think that would be enough to get _a_ percentage of the populace at least talking/thinking about it (if not a large percentage).
If free will is an illusion, why not the rest of the world (a la Descartes' Evil demon thought experiment)? Why do you trust your senses at all?
I am compelled by the notion of free will described by Schopenhauer (expanding on Kant). Namely, that 'one can do as he wills but not will as he wills'. Lived experience leads us to infer an indeterminate/inseparable energy/force/Will that we perceive with our senses and organize through the concepts of time/space/causality. However, we, being on the 'inside' of one particular object, are in a peculiar state: we are free to accept or reject this Will.
If I ask you to think of a number between 0 and 10, a number may pop up in your head (seemingly out of nowhere, though clearly through some process affected by genetics/neurochemistry). Despite this, you (whatever 'you' is) are still free to accept or reject this proposition.
In this sense, people can still be punished for accepting propositions of murder in some coherent way. You are affected by, but not the sum total of, your genetics and neurochemistry. Nevertheless, the latter might play a large role that we shouldn't discount.
> Despite this, you (whatever 'you' is) are still free to accept or reject this proposition.
The outcome happens from all the previous moments you lived. Randomness doesn't make a person have free will and randomness may just be an illusion from our lack of understanding when it comes to what's resulting in the outcome we appear as random.
We're the sum total of genetics, environmental factors and all the external forces upon us since birth. That means if we're being punished it was outside the realm of it could have been different.
Probably no more dangerous than free will beliefs because as with some determinist beliefs, it's moderated by thinking life is dictated by a greater order, see Calvinism or the many determinsts who aren't "dangerous" as well as those of us who think deterministic belief leads us to more nuanced and moderate views on societal events, that something begets something begets something, ad infinitum which can lead to better prevention and help mechanisms. I'm certainly not a danger other than to cheesecake or endangered anymore than anyone else who believes the will is free of physical influence and that at its core it's random, or a god or something fueling the RNG or whatever.
A single example: the US justice system is based on retribution. People are condemned to prisons and sometimes death as a result of ultimately how they are wired and the circumstances they were in- there was no 'choice' made regarding whether or not to steal or kill, they were always going to do that, they never had any real 'control' over their actions. If anything criminality in any form should be considered a mental illness, but instead we gladly put people in tortuous conditions because we have wantonly decided that they are guilty, bad/evil, people.
This focuses on the "retribution/punishment" aspect of the penal system, but it's also important to remember that "deterrence" and "reform" are also important. Even if you feel people don't deserve to be punished for their crimes due to the crimes' inevitability, it's still important for repercussions to exist to create a society where it is less likely for people to commit those crimes (for fear of punishment), and where people who do commit crimes undergo a process that makes them less likely to do so in the future. (There are better ways than prison to reform people, of course, but not as many to deter people from committing crimes in the first place)
That just sounds like a one sided convenience for people fated to not be hurt by the system that doesn't harm them. Deterrence can be from not having to go through the rehabilitation system.
I agree with most of your reply but imposing a contentious philosophy upon others wouldn't go well nor would I want to condone it. I'm not very determined to believe in determinism but I do and it doesn't change my views on punishment very much as I'm still determined to have a sense of self and societal protection in that I'd prefer "bad" people kept from society until reformed although I am less judgemental as a result from thinking about it more over the years.
Just because we can't determine why something happens doesn't mean its not predetermined. Every RNG gets its seed somehow, I don't see how we can be so sure that there is absolutely _zero_ cause for a given effect.
Bell's Theorem implies that if there is some kind of hidden variable controlling the outcome of a random quantum event like a seed, then it must work non-locally, which maybe doesn't completely rule it out, but it's really suggestive given that locality is one of the common assumptions like conservation of energy that has lead to a lot of progress in physics.
Interestingly, there is a local deterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics: the Many-Worlds Interpretation. The interpretation is considered by many to be what the Schroedinger equation by itself with nothing extra added (like wave function collapse) implies about the world. There is no objective randomness. The 10,000-foot view of it is that any random quantum event with multiple possible outcomes causes the world to branch into a separate world for each outcome. (Generally random quantum events have a continuous outcome space instead of discrete outcomes, but it's harder to talk about a continuous spectrum of "worlds". The "worlds" of MWI aren't necessarily discrete atomic things; the word "world" is more of a fuzzy label for our convenience, like the word "pile". Also, per the Schroedinger equation, there's situations where multiple histories leading to equivalent worlds can cancel out, decreasing the measure and therefore observed probability of that world occurring; that's how we could possibly know this whole splitting business is going on.)
However, a system like this would still have subjective randomness, in the sense that there's no way for you to predict the value of a random quantum event. (Say you have a device that when you press the button, it will measure radiation from a radioactive object inside it for a period of time, and then output "heads" if it measured more than the average amount and "tails" if less.) Assuming it's set up as advertised, the idea of predicting the result doesn't even make sense, because after the measurement, there will be a cluster of worlds with a version of you that sees "heads", and a cluster of worlds with a version of you that sees "tails". Predicting which one you'll be makes as much sense as predicting who you will be before you were born. (I find it interesting that no matter how deterministic of a universe you imagine, there's always the subjective randomness resulting from the indexical uncertainty in who you find yourself being. MWI extends indexical uncertainty like that to more situations.)
True, but I think this isn't a good response to the idea that determinism means you don't have control over your life. Reality having randomness doesn't give us more control over our lives. (If anything, I'd think that fact alone would mean we have less, because it means there's probably entropy getting in the way of whatever our true decision processes are.)
I really love the way this article puts the issue: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NEeW7eSXThPz7o4Ne/thou-art-p.... The idea that determinism takes away free will from us is inherently based on the idea that we're something outside of physics, and that physics is exclusively deciding the future instead of us. However, if you make the common assumption that our brain is a material object running within physics and producing our decisions, then there is no contradiction between deterministic physics and whatever is meant by free will.
Another way I like to think about it: If you made an AI and ran it in some closed simulation, would you expect it to care whether the simulation was completely deterministic (with all probabilistic events operating from a pre-chosen seed and a strong RNG) or had some kind of randomness? The question won't directly affect the AI's life inside the simulation either way. Wouldn't you find it weird if it did actually care and had a preference about that detail of its world, or if it thought it wasn't a true free AI if there was no randomness in its simulation? If the AI thought the world had randomness or not, and then learned the opposite, you'd find it weird if the AI restructured everything it knew about itself and the world directly based on that. If you the operator happened to toggle whether the simulation had randomness several times over its run while working on its code, and at some later point the AI was let out of the simulation, you wouldn't expect the AI to take offense at this change. There's nothing about its quality of life, decision-making abilities, or life circumstances that would be affected by the answer. It's just an implementation detail of its world that's not directly relevant to an intelligence, except in matters of modeling how the world works.
Fate wins in the end. However, it doesn't change the fact we're all systems. When information is presented the systems take it in like a variable and it will have a far greater significance if the information wasn't shared. I don't believe in free will.
