ZOMBIE FORUMS

It's astonishing that, with all this philosophical b.s. we keep spouting, that we can't come up with a better conclusion than "Even if it doesn't exist, human society must continue to believe free will does exist to properly determine its code of ethics."

And now,

[EDIT: Double post.]

Kitsune, I agree. Free will does not exist just as an absolute moral code does not exist. However, if determinism and moral relativism were put into practice, civilization would collapse. But even the criteria we use to judge free will false is itself false: materialism, upon which Science is founded, is yet another "useful fiction". It definitely helps us out a lot to look at the universe from a scientific point of view; it has given us cars, computers, etc. However, if there's anything we should conclude from the free will debate, it's that just because something is useful and "works" doesn't make it fundamentally true.

All of human civilization is, in the end, founded on lies. Even what we call "truths" are lies. For an in-depth discussion of this, check out this essay.

Uh... does it really matter if free will exists? How important is it if you really did choose to perform X or if X was destined to occur since the beginning of time? X still happened either way, and there is absolutely no way to prove or disprove free will. So... yeah. It's like arguing the existence of God. You can make really good arguments for or against it, but you can never defininitively answer the question.

And thank God I won't see the flames from Icy because of this (I just have this feeling) since my DSL is still busted. ;)

I hate being so predictable. But then we all have that problem, or else the issue of free will wouldn't fascinate us so much...

[flame]
Have you actually LISTENED to anything we've been saying? Just die, please.
[/flame]

Okay, first of all, if you'd been paying attention, you'd notice that we've already dismissed the idea that there are only two possbilities, i.e. that free will exists or that everything has been determined since the beginning of time. Events can happen at random without the existence of free will.

Secondly, free will can be disproven, as long as we assume that modern science is at least somewhat accurate in its description of the universe. To prove this I'm going to use a modified version of Krylex's original argument.

Basically, there are three seperate possible ways the universe could work.

1. Every event is directly caused by a previous event.

2. Every event is an outcome of a previous event, albeit one of many possible outcomes.

3. A combination of 1 and 2 (for example, 2 holds in cases where quantum effects are important (usually very small scales), 1 holds in cases where quantum effects are unimportant).

Now, let's say take a certain event. According to the first possibility, that event was directly caused by something else, e.g. a person's action that caused that event. However, this action itself was caused by another event, e.g. the person's decision to perform that action. However, we cannot stop there. This decision must be caused by something. And so on. In the second possibility, the event was one of many events which could have occurred as an outcome of the action, which was one of many events that could have occurred as an outcome of the decision, which was one of many outcomes itself. However, this does not leave room for free will either. Quantum chance operates in hydrogen gas just as much as it operates in our mind. If we have free will, then so does a cloud of hydrogen. The point is, randomality does not equal free will. Possibility three has no room for free will either, since it's simply a combination of 1 and 2. If A is false and B is false, then A/\B is also false.

As for what significance this has in the real world, well... even if it has none, it's fun to debate. Sure, it's intellectual masturbation, but then again I think all of us engage in its physical equivalent, so what's wrong with it?

However, I don't believe that this is totally useless. I think it's important to know the truth. I also think that realizing that free will doesn't exist, and trying to come to grips with this fact, instead of living in illusion, is important. We cannot live without the illusion of free will; however, at the same time, we should keep in mind that it is, in the end, an ILLUSION, however useful it may be.

Just playing devil's advocate here...

What's to say that a cloud of hydrogen gas can't have free will in some sense? It's fairly clear that, if free will exists, it's mediated by the information stored in our brains in combination with some kind of low-level determination principle, probably expressed on the quantum level. In a system with high uncertainty but low stored information (such as a cloud of hot gas), any kind of inherent sentience would have little or nothing to base decisions on, so the results of said decisions would be totally random from our perspective. Which is roughly the state of affairs surrounding the garden-variety waveform collapse (or universe evolution, if you take the Many Worlds interpretation) that we're all familiar with.

P-M

Quatum mechanics and Special relativity were both false by themselves, however they were true when they were applied together with the Superstring theory. Though of course that isn't proven yet.

Probably true, to a lot of people, but no one said that the nature of the universe had any obligation to conform to our sense of aesthetics. And while our current computers may not be able to tell a juice stain from a Pollock painting (hmm, bad example), it seems likely that if we are ever able to create truly sentient AI's in the future, they would be capable of an artistic sense.



I wonder, am I the only one who finds Nietzsche comforting?

Anyway, I read the piece. I liked the bit in the beginning about the insignificance of mankind (although I've never been fond of the idea of going quietly into that good night, myself- I say we should at least try to become all-powerful posthuman entities able to remake the universe as we see fit). The rest of it seemed liked a rather overlong admonition about the map/territory distinction and Solipsism, though. Then again, it was written in 1872, and I imagine such concepts were more alien back then, and required a more exhaustive explanation.

I doubt that ancient Greece was quite the utopia he seems to imply, or perhaps I mistook his intent.

And hell, I'm a Discordian- we know all about "Truth(TM)" :)



It might be more accurate to say that they were both incomplete by themselves, since they were both true within certain boundaries (just as Newton's "whatever comes up, must come down" rule is true within certain distances and velocities from Earth). Putting two completely false things together rarely yeilds a truth; putting two half-truths together is a different matter.



I've always tended to think of of consciousness (which is tied up with our concept of Free Will) as a continuum, rather than a binary yes/no attribute. So we could just say that a cloud of hydrogen gas ranks fairly low on the consciousness scale, a plant that reacts to the light somewhat higher, and so on through humans, hyperintelligent aliens, etc.

I have to agree with WI. We should at least try to become all powerful, universe shifting beings. Granted, to do this, a great deal of our natural charecteristics will have to be changed. Humans must become something more than what we are now, just as our anscetors became something more than what they were. We have untapped potential people. Lets get busy...

I think you're somewhat misinterpreting the point of the essay (which, by the way, is one of my favorite essays ever, right up there with Philip K. Dick's "How to Build a Universe that Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later"). Nietzsche's going far beyond drawing a simple "map/territory" distinction - he's trying to show that most of what we think of as "objective" reality is more our imposition on it than anything else. Logic is a human invention, as are categories. I'd go into a whole long rant about this, but instead I'll just suggest you read some modern and postmodern philosophy. Specifically, Nietzsche, Berkeley, Hume, and Derrida. Also, check out the Tao Te Ching if you haven't already.

Yeah, I suppose I was oversimplifying. It would probably be more accurate to say that our non-human descendants (not through biological birth, mind you) might become all-powerful blah blah blah. If they dont, then yeah, we're just a mote in God's eye. I'd at least like for us to become a splinter :)


D'oh! Personal favorites are involved, I'd better tread lightly... Anyway, since Nietzsche's not here to defend himself (being dead and all, not unlike God :), you'll have to take his place. I like the guy, honestly, old nihilist that he was.

About the essay- I guess that's what I was trying to say with the Solipsism bit, just not doing a good job of it. To be honest, it does seem as if it's related to the map/territory distinction, except that he's saying since we never get to see the territory, only the maps we make for ourselves, we might as well throw away the maps, which seems... well, more Nihilist than Solipsist, I suppose. But of course, those are both just arbitrary categories which my modern hubristic mind employs in a futile attempt to impose order on an uncaring universe... (Honestly, he makes me feel all warm and fuzzy- is there something wrong with me?)

I don't know what my favorite essay is, but I suspect it would be something by Mencken. I'll have too look up that one by Dick when I get the chance- I always liked his paranoid-existentialist science fiction.

By all means, feel free to rant about Berkeley and Derrida. If you go too far into postmodern deconstructionism, though, I may have to smack you...

Nietzsche wasn't actually a nihilist. He coined the term nihilism, but he used it to describe the effects of the collapse of absolute meaning and the effects this would have on civilization. He actually spoke of it as a negative thing that had to be overcome for Western Civilization to avoid destruction. Perhaps he was overreacting, but then again he has a point. With no absolute morality, there's no basis for moral judgment, and that messes things up. A LOT.



Well, it's all a matter of perspective, I guess. Sentimental Nihilism... no, that just doesn't sound right.

Anyway, you're correct that his essay does pertain to the map/territory thing, but I was just pointing out that it uses the analogy in a much more radical way than it's normally used. I wanted to make sure you understood that.



The Dick essay is... well, it's interesting, certainly. I don't agree with most of it, but the ideas presented are just so intriguing(ly crazy). If the essay proves anything, it's that the line between insanity and genius is thin indeed, or perhaps nonexistent.



Well, Berkeley ain't a postmodernist... he's a Modern philosopher ("Modern" usually taken to mean anyone from Descartes to Hegel). He and Hume are basically the first Modern Skeptics, and I think they set the stage for what Nietzsche and other philosophers will do later. However, they themselves didn't go as far as others would later.

As for Deconstruction... I have to say that it is one of the most misunderstood theories in the humanities today. No, actually, it's THE MOST misunderstood theory. Deconstruction does NOT mean that "every single interpretation is correct", neither does it mean that "words are the only reality". Both are GROSS oversimplifications of a theory too intricate to be reduced to sound bytes, akin to the frequent misrepresentations of Quantum Physics vis-a-vis Schroedinger's Cat. I really feel sorry for Derrida (who basically invented deconstruction)... the man's been spending the last few decades of his life trying to convince his detractors that he's not some insane nihilist-solipsist intellectual terrorist bent on destroying the literary world.

The sad part is, with Deconstruction and Postmodernism in general, that not only do most of its detractors misunderstand it, but many of its supporters do as well. I'm thinking specifically of the Alan Sokal hoax, where a physicist (Sokal) submitted a completely tongue-in-cheek parody to the "postmodern" journal Social Text, and actually got it published. This says more about the ignorance of many who call themselves "deconstructionists" or "postmodernists" (simply because it's the trendy thing to do in literary circles) than it does about actual Postmodern theorists, who know what the hell they're talking about.

One of these days I'm going to post a rant explaining Postmodern theory, deconstruction, and all the rest of that stuff in detail... However, to really explain it my post would have to wind up being about twice as long as your infamous Reloaded rant, and even THEN it could easily be misinterpreted. The point is, whenever you simplify ANY complex theory, it winds up looking like idiocy.

He may not have technically been a Nihilist, but some of his ideas are certainly nihilistic, in the popular sense. I mean, you yourself just linked to an essay of his that basically states that all of human thought is utter crap. I suppose a real "Nihilist" would be someone who thought the same way, but who unlike Nietzsche didn't care about finding a way to overcome it?


Yeah, I seem to remember reading something about him going completely batshit in his later years. I can't say I would be very surprised if it were true- to judge by his books, his grip on consensus reality was somewhat tenuous to begin with. Then again, so is mine :) My guess is he just decided at some point that he had had enough of being "sane" and wanted to try something different…


I'm going to break this up a bit, hope you don't mind…

Yeah, my comment was mostly directed at your mention of Derrida, since I remembered his name always coming up in conjunction with Postmodernism. Berkeley, from what little I know of him, reminds me of a more religiously-influenced and less grim version of Nietzsche. In other words, I don't like him as much ^_^


I was being facetious with the smacking bit, but I suppose it was still something of a knee-jerk reaction. See, when I hear the words "Postmodernism" or "Deconstructionism", I tend to think of graduate students writing long-winded papers which use unnecessary verbosity, specialized language, and maybe a couple token leftist invectives to cover up the fact that if they have a point at all (which is frequently doubtful), it is neither illuminating or insightful, and could have been summed up in a few sentences of normal writing. I think of things like the (hilarious) Sokal hoax, or this (actually, I was starting to get interested in that analysis- there must be something wrong with me :) No doubt both Postmodernism and Deconstructionism have an unfairly negative reputation based on things that are not strictly representative of their original intent, not unlike Communism, but those associations are nonetheless understandable, given that they both often turn out like such crap in practice. But I suppose, as you say, there's postmodernist deconstructionism, and then there's postmodernist deconstructionism. I just wish there was a bit less of the former around (or the latter, depending on how you read that sentence) After all, I don't mind Postmodernism as described in Larry Wall's rather enjoyable essay on Perl, although I'm not sure how close his is to the "correct" definition. Deconstructionism I'm a bit more wary of, no doubt due to having my enjoyment of certain books utterly ruined by having to read them in school, and extract "meaning". But I suppose even it has its uses.


While certainly, any simplification is by definition going to leave something out, I've always thought that the best and most elegant theories are those which are capable of having their basics expressed fairly simply. The theory of the conservation of energy, for instance, can be summed up in one equation ( E=MC^2 ) and a brief explanation of what the letters stand for. Of course, I suppose a knowledge of basic mathematics is an implicit requirement to understand it. Perhaps one of the reasons philosophical essays tend to be so wordy is that they lack a well-defined common ground from which to work, the way physics does with mathematics, since any such proposed common ground would immediately become just another subject of philosophical debate, and so have to sort of define where they're coming from as they go. I suppose in a way, Philosophy is simply the search for a way to make itself workable. Rather postmodern, that :) Hmm… I guess that's the real difference between Science and Philosophy - in the former, we put aside our Solipsistic questioning of reality enough to be able to have a conceptual base from which to work; while Philosophy can't tear its own down fast enough. Really, I think Philosophy has only a few ends if you take it far enough- a sort of Zen-like simple acceptance of the universe, or a ponderous structure of interlocking theories and countertheories that eventually becomes so unmanageable that no one is sure what they're about. Although I suppose I'm just adding another theory by saying this… Damn Philosophy's nasty tendency to swallow meta-commentary whole! Now I'm going to have to go read Gödel, Escher Bach to clear my head… You could have left me to my nice, simple, higher-dimensional geometry and quantum physics, but nooo, you had to go dragging me through the quagmire of meta-philosophy. You're an evil, evil man, Icy.

Oh yes, and-

*begins to chant*
Rant! Rant! Rant!

I think you should go ahead and write it. Enlighten us so that I, at least, can rescind my kill-on-sight policy for Postmodern theorists >:) Hey, tomorrow's Saturday, which is always a dead day at work- I need something to read. Besides, I can't carry the banner of USENET-length posts for this forum by myself! (Believe it or not, I actually had one longer than the Reloaded rant written for another thread, explaining what I see as the difference between Intelligence and Knowledge as it relates to implicit and explicit data, but I couldn't get the first paragraph to come out right and by that time the thread had become buried, so I scrapped it. True story.)

Hmm, it's late, so no doubt some portion of the above will seem silly to me in the morning. We'll see…

I was going to type out a whole long rant, but I got through a few paragraphs before I kind of gave up. I gave up because I realized I was basically summarizing a book I had read about postmodernism. I figure I might as well just let you read the book yourself instead of rewriting the whole thing via a post. It's called "Teach Yourself Postmodernism", and it's by Glenn Ward. It goes into the cultural/artistic aspect of it much more than I would have, but it's still a very interesting read.



Here's the essay, by the way.




I read the essay. His description of postmodernism is actually quite accurate. His definition of deconstruction, on the other hand, isn't really the correct one, but he does have the general idea of it correct. Postmodernism's really all about celebrating incoherence, complexity, and diversity. It's about mixing and matching different cultural contexts ("metanarratives" to use the snobby term). The Matrix, for example, is (at least aesthetically) very postmodern, because it combines eastern mysticism, christianity, mythology, mathematics, and computer science in the context of the genre of science-fiction/action movie. That's basically six different cultures mixing together in one film, and it creates a cool kind of pastische.

By the way, I actually had a class with Alan Sokal - he's a professor at my college, NYU. Very crazy, energetic, and overall likeable guy.



Yes. Yes I am.

You know, I'm just about to start reading GEB. I've had it for a while, and every once in a while I flip open to a random page and read a few paragraphs. Every time I do, I get mindfucked. The book looks REALLY FUCKING AMAZING.

Anyway...

It's interesting that you should mention the virtues of simplicity, though, considering my description of postmodernism as a reaction against that attitude.

As for philosophy... philosophy has gotten to a point where most philosophers realize that any description we try to give for the universe is founded upon our human assumptions and is thus, in the end, a lie. I mean, think about basic logical laws like Occam's Razor. Why does the simplest explanation have to be the correct one? Why can't there be an invisible pink unicorn in the room with me now? There's really no reason why we shouldn't believe that the chances of the unicorn being there are less than the chances of his not being there. The reason I say there is no invisible pink unicorn in my room is because he doesn't effect me even if he exists. Once you probe the concept of truth enough, you realize that unless you're defining truth as "what's effective" the concept really doesn't have much actual meaning. And then you have to figure out what being "effective" means.

So where does that leave us? Well, we've made up a lot of stories to try to explain reality. Postmodernists would call these stories "metanarratives". None are reallly true, although some (such as science) are more "useful" in the sense of being able to predict things using the simplest possible models. However, since all of human society basically consists of metanarratives, we might as well play around with them, since they're all we have. And that's really what postmodern art is about - playing with metanarratives - mixing and matching them... Like in The Matrix.

Dude . . . that PKD essay is so amazingly off-the-wall crazy that it actually makes perfect, coherent sense . . .

I don't buy into the whole Timeshift thing, at least not the way he presents it, but it DOES give us one hell of a concept to fuck around with the universe in . . . But it presents a lot of ideas I've seen crop up in his writings. And GEB is a very fun book to read when bored.

Ok. I will start at the beginning and reply to what has been said.

*most of the posts*

Holy shit, you guys have done a good job of muddling this up so...

*Shear, Cut, Chop*

I will build my argument from pretty much scratch.



True. We are restricted to the laws of the world we live in. I cannot destroy the time space continuum, or jump back in time and kill my infant self. (or for a sick twist on that, become my own father) Those are impossible for me to do. This however does not mean that I do not have Free Will. Free Will is the ability to look at two (or more) options and choose one over the other.

Now I can see where a serious argument can be made for predetermination without the use of a god. Krylex pretty much said it. I shall simplify it. Action and reaction. What you are now is determined. (A) If a stimulus (S) is given to A, that the stimulus will cause a reaction, and a change. A will become B. It becomes a formula, A+S=B. It all becomes a game of knowing the answers to the equations. E.g To create A follow formula 3. In that case, all you need to predict the future is to know all the variables in a persons life, and know how those variables will affect that person.

Now here is where I come in. I have recently concluded that Order is not the opposite of Chaos, Fate is. All that you need to determine the Fate of a person is to account for all of the variables in there life. Chaos proves there are infinite variables. In order to determine what someone will be doing 20 years down the road you need to pretty much account for every single mote of existence in the universe. Every atom, every electron, every quark, every string. Then you need the knowledge to predict what will happen to each of them when they interact with each other. It can be really simple, i.e. Newtonian Physics. It can also be really complex. I once heard that the gravity emitted by a single atom can effect the outcome of a break in a game of pool. Then add on the workings of the brain (you need to be able to predict that as well.).

It all boils down to this. If you have the knowledge of every single atom and quantum particle in the universe, and have the processing power to be able to calculate and predict the “action/reaction” action that will be going on, you deserve to be called “God”. Even in this scenario, I think Free Will will still be in the world.

This is where I start to fuck everyone up. Saying that Fate rules all suggests that there is a being that knows all. A god. At one point this god... I’m pulling this directly from a book. Let me pull the quote.



That works.

Reply?

I should note that according the Uncertainty Principle, the best we could do would be to predict the probability of a certain universe becoming expressed, not which one it would be. Of course, a god that is beyond the physical universe and not subject to its rules might be able to get around this.

See also my post in Icy's new Matrix thread. It's by someone else, but I agree with the viewpoint.

That quote reminds me of one of Hofstadter's Dialogues between the Tortoise and Achilles. Remember, the one about self-referential systems, and Bach's Ever-Rising Canon?

That was good. Reminds me I still have to finish that book.

By assuming multiple universes, we destroy fate. The idea of predestination is that there is no other way. The idea of infinite usinverses is a universe for every choice.

There is no freewill
We are opressed by government, by parents, by friends, and by society!!!!!!!

What do you think! 8)