Hello,

Are real life events run-time configurable, or are they deterministic? Is this determined by whether or not the real life events are stored in a fast accessible ram or if they are just stored to disk or lost?

I have often found that a ram constraint in one of my programs caused me to be more creative and make a much better program. Would this coincidence apply to real life events as well? The less memory one has the more effort one must put into using one's brain, thus one becomes smarter? Is that what smart is?

I promise this is really all video game related, because I found that when I started programming video games I had to (am having to would be the correct tense here) change my entire outlook on life about somethings such as what it means to 'exist.'

So, I am wondering if it is games that are causing me to see the true nature of things, or if I am changing my way of looking at things to better understand the nature of games. Because nothing outside the world frustum exists.

-Dave Ottley

That's some deep shit right there.

Thanks to Godel and others, it has been proven that we do not have the ability to determine if the Universe is deterministic. It is a property that we cannot measure from within.

So the debate is entirely philosophical.


For myself, I believe the Universe is not deterministic.

If the Universe is deterministic then you have no free will, so you might as well jump under a bus because that fate is predetermined.

FRob,

I disagree with your edit. Just because "something" is determined to will have happened at some point in the future does not mean that that something is knowable by us. If your logic was true then it would be in everybody's best interest (or at least not in any negative interest to any individual) to jump under a bus, thus ending the human race. Certainly a deterministic world is better than none at all, and because we cannot prove it one way or the other, I would like to assume the minimum amount and believe that the Universe is deterministic, because that meshes with how we are able to interpret things sensually. I don't see a need for any non-determinism and that fact does not imply that I cannot (as a CPU) make decisions about my future and my effect on the future of the Universe, thus "altering" the fate of that Universe from some other state that would have emerged had my CPU been unavailable to make those calculations.

-Dave Ottley

This is basically identical to something I said in that thread about consciousness but I think it bears repeating:

I think referring to determinism as if it is antithetical to free will is creating a false dichotomy and I think it leads to notion of "free will" that is ultimately more disappointing even than one in which our actions are fully predetermined.

It's intuitively "obvious" that if it's possible to predict exactly which actions I will take in which situations, then I don't really have "free will." That's fine, I guess, if we define "free" in such a way that doesn't allow for this kind of predictability, but what about "will"? Let's say we introduce non-determinism (if such a thing even exists) to give me back my "freedom." That means that, at least some subset of my actions are completely unpredictable.

That is, nothing about the observable world has any bearing whatsoever on what I end up doing in such cases. This includes both the makeup of my brain itself as well as everything my brain knows. Is this "free"? Sure. But how can it be "will"? I claim that, at very least, my will has to have intentionality; that is, it has to be "about" something. It has to be about my environment, or it has to be about me. My choices have to have at least some basis in reality (as it is accessible to me) for them to be "choices" at all. And non-determinism completely strips me of this by making my choices by definition unrelated to everything my brain knows, does, thinks, or feels.

After all, if my "choices" are non-deterministic, how are they different from your "choices"? My "will" is just as much your "will" or the "will" of the God of Randomness or whatever else you want to call it, because, by virtue of being devoid of any meaningful relationship to the visible world, my "choices" no longer have anything to do with me.

If this is what it takes for me to have "free will" then I'd rather go back to my old boring non-free will, because at least my choices will be more related to my circumstances than flipping a coin, not less.

I would like to assume the minimum amount and believe that the Universe is deterministic, because that meshes with how we are able to interpret things sensually. I don't see a need for any non-determinism and that fact does not imply that I cannot (as a CPU) make decisions about my future and my effect on the future of the Universe

That is the crux of the philosophical argument.


It is a very old debate. It is also a very common topic for college and university studies. I remember writing essays on it in my freshman English class, and again in a computer science class, and a third time in a debate class I took for fun.


The premise goes something like this:

If the Universe is fully deterministic, we can rewind it from the last moment of the Universe all the way back to the big bang. We can replay it infinitely many times and it will always progress exactly the same way, along the same paths, without any deviation. That is true by definition of deterministic.


Following that reasoning, a deterministic Universe is one where we have no free will. All the conclusions we reach and all the actions we take were determined by the state of the Universe at inception. We may believe that we have free will, but it is a logical error. This again is true by definition of determinism.

If we were able to alter the state of events, then we would not replay the Universe from beginning to end without any deviation. If that were true then the Universe would have some degree of non-determinism.


So do we have the ability to choose, and therefore introduce non-determinism, or do we not?

The answer generally reverts to the classic "Cogito ergo sum."

Certainly a deterministic world is better than none at all, and because we cannot prove it one way or the other, I would like to assume the minimum amount and believe that the Universe is deterministic, because that meshes with how we are able to interpret things sensually.
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My understanding is that at the most fundamental levels yet probed, nature appears to be non-deterministic. The consensus is that the experimental evidence is overwhelming. It is merely an accident of scale (in both space and time) that our senses perceive determinism, as the statistical amount of non-determinism appears negligible from our perspective.

I find it interesting that you feel that determinism is the "minimum".

I don't see a need for any non-determinism and that fact does not imply that I cannot (as a CPU) make decisions about my future and my effect on the future of the Universe, thus "altering" the fate of that Universe from some other state that would have emerged had my CPU been unavailable to make those calculations.
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How could there be an alternative state? If the universe is perfectly deterministic, whether your "CPU" is either available or unavailable at a given moment of time, and the outcome of any computation is fixed with the initial conditions. Your affect on the future is a known quantity - if "affect" can even be used. You would be a consequence, not an antecedent.

It sounds like you haven't fully fleshed out the self consistency of these views.

Here's a question: does non-determinism mean you have free will?

My answer: technically, no. It just means you can't predict the outcome, though you can still be totally free will-less. If things are non-deterministic, it's possible you have no control over the non-determinism/randomness, and thus, are just being acted upon by randomness rather than willfully acting yourself.

Of course, this doesn't mean you don't have free will in a non-deterministic universe. It's possible you do have free will. But I don't think we can say non-deterministic = free will, because, for example, you wouldn't randomly apply forces to a proton, and because it's moving in a non-deterministic way, conclude the proton is moving according to its own free will. It's not; it's being acted upon by random impulses. Hence, I rather think a better conclusion is non-deterministic = maybe free will, or maybe not.

Free will is a mind boggling notion, because it's hard to really define what "will" and "choice" is, regardless of whether you take a deterministic or non-deterministic stance.

If the Universe is deterministic then you have no free will, so you might as well jump under a bus because that fate is predetermined.

That sounds like the same reason that people choose to believe creationism over evolution -- "I have a bad emotional reaction to those ideas, so they must be wrong".
It sounds like the only visible effects of your definitions of free-will vs non-free-will, is whether an omniscient obvserver can predict our actions, which, seeing there isn't one around here, means there's no impact at all. Maybe this particular way of thinking about will is a big red herring?

Why should we despair if some omniscient observer was able to predict our next move? Assuming there is no omniscient observer, then there's no real impact on our lives. Maybe if you know that your actions are going to repeat unchanged for all time, you'd think about being a nicer person to people around you -- some people who have had the "life flash before your eyes" NDE have reported a huge increase in their empathy after realising that their choices can/will be replayed -- but of course, if that's the case then it's either going to happen or not, already

It's not nearly as frightening an idea to other cultures. e.g. some religions make a strong distinction between your mind (the bit that makes choices) and the "inner-god", who has no control at all but is conscious and watching everything "you" do.
Depending on your background, the words "I" and "me" can mean very different things. It's typical though for many people to be very shallow in the way we define "I".
If you don't believe that "you" are your body or your mind, but "you" are the watcher of your mind, then you already don't have any free will, determinism or not, and many people are very comfortable with that.

It's possible that the universe is deterministic, but it's also possible that there are infinitely many initial conditions, giving rise to infinitely many variations of deterministic universes. If "you" were only an observer that had no outwards interaction with the universe, then your presence in a universe wouldn't affect it, and let's say you could travel from deterministic-world to deterministic-world at will, this could give the observer the impression of having created change in a single mutable-universe. ...but that's outside of the realm of science so I guess it's all just about being emotionally comfortable at that point.

But I don't think we can say non-deterministic = free will

That's a really good point. We have randomly influenced will, for sure, but that's true in both a deterministic and non-deterministic universe. We are sufficiently complicated that it's near impossible to predict our choices (most of the time), making them seem like true choices. ...but what makes our choices different to the "choices" of a particle? Why should we believe that there's other mechanisms behind them?

Modern neuroscience is poking uncomfortable holes in our ideas of choice, with experiments showing that when asked to press a button at a random moment, immediately after making the decision to do so, it's possible to detect that the decision has been made up to 7 seconds before the participant is aware that they've made the decision. They believe they acted on the spur of the moment, but the data shows that their actions were pre-determined.
This doesn't mean the universe is or isn't deterministic, it just means that we're just big complex machinery like everything else.

If you really don't believe that your free will is actually controlled by a million random occurrences, watch Derren Brown's work -- he does a lot of "mind reading", some of which is for real (e.g. careful observation of unconscious muscular cues), but most of which is just great showmanship combined with planting the "read" idea into the subjects mind minutes, hours or days in advance. These people believe they've chosen some particular thought using their free will, when actually, they've just been manipulated into thinking that particular thing. He's even manipulated people into "freely deciding of their own will", to commit bank robberies or confess to murders.

Here's a question: does non-determinism mean you have free will?

My answer: technically, no. It just means you can't predict the outcome, though you can still be totally free will-less. If things are non-deterministic, it's possible you have no control over the non-determinism/randomness, and thus, are just being acted upon by randomness rather than willfully acting yourself.

Of course, this doesn't mean you don't have free will in a non-deterministic universe. It's possible you do have free will. But I don't think we can say non-deterministic = free will, because, for example, you wouldn't randomly apply forces to a proton, and because it's moving in a non-deterministic way, conclude the proton is moving according to its own free will. It's not; it's being acted upon by random impulses. Hence, I rather think a better conclusion is non-deterministic = maybe free will, or maybe not.

Free will is a mind boggling notion, because it's hard to really define what "will" and "choice" is, regardless of whether you take a deterministic or non-deterministic stance.

I think my post above addresses this: not only is it possible that "you have no control over the non-determinism," it's necessary, except in cases of extremely counter-intuitive notions of "you." In any cases in which the final outcome of a "choice" is determined by some non-deterministic process, then there's simply no way to justify it as a choice made by you that distinguishes "you" from "me" or "random-God" or that tree over there.