Deterministic universes disallow any concept of free will or variance beyond what was calculated at the very femtosecond the universe started. Nothing is possible except what has happened and will happen.
The other comments go over it more thoroughly but let’s more directly connect it to this idea; specifically this post is talking about Star Trek rules for teleportation.
This type of teleportation is that your body is scanned down to the exact spin of every quantum particle and wave, then it is destroyed entirely, and turned into energy by one machine. This information is encoded in a data stream that can be saved, stored, and reused at any point. Then. Somewhere else, a different machine reads that data, and fully recreates you down to the spin in the quantum particles making up the arbitrary concept of ‘you.’
In order for data to be stored or retrieved it has to be unchanging, predictable. If every time you opened your company’s spreadsheets they changed randomly one would assume something is terribly wrong somewhere in the system. This essentially means that by some method you are able to determine the exact ‘data’ involved at any give point.
When we extend this to ‘consciousness,’ we then have the natural consequence of these facts being that consciousness itself is determinable. That there is some set of predictable things that can be done to generate a person that believes they are conscious. If there is truly no difference between the person that was killed, and the person that was made, then the natural consequence of this is consciousness itself is deterministic, i.e. there is a set of predictable interactions that given infinite time and infinite resources you could compute.
If, then, there is a predictable set of interactions that can form consciousness; then like all other predictable interactions we would be able to trace its start, its source of these interactions to the start of the universe. Which would mean there is no possible variance of what could have happened. 1 + 1 will always equal 2. Every single time. We can derive that to mean a + b will always equal c. Which if true, would mean that given the exact starting point of all energy in the universe, we can perfectly predict, or recreate, the universe.
This has the logical consequence of meaning there is no other outcome than what has happened; and what will happen has already been determined. This isn’t just the generality of ‘fate’ or ‘destiny,’ this is down to every single specific micro interaction, including your thoughts.
In this world, should it exist, the fact you read this comment was determined at the start of the universe. Name a struggle ‘you’ overcame. You couldn’t have failed at it. You didn’t struggle. You were always going to do exactly whatever you did. You didn’t have a choice to fail. You didn’t have a choice, period. You didn’t achieve anything. You can’t achieve things, because achievement implies an alternative. You don’t have the luxury of alternatives in a deterministic universe. Everything will always play out exactly the same, no matter how many times the underlying equations of the universe are solved.
Consciousness being deterministic, as evidenced by being able to be perfectly copied and arbitrarily pasted, means that there is no choice involved in life. That no choices have ever been made. By anyone. At any time. And never will be. I didn’t choose to write this comment. You didn’t choose to read it. Your thoughts about it are not yours, just the result of an electrochemical reaction that is a small part of the equations that started this universe. You literally can’t choose to act on them and reply, whether or not you reply was decided for you before light as a concept happened to form in the universe.
Free will, as a concept, posits exactly one thing. That an individual entity with free will can choose something. That they are not being led along a predetermined track with no ability to simply stop and get off. This concept is entirely at odds with a deterministic universe, as no choice can be made once the universe ‘starts.’
So, in order for free will to exist, we cannot be in a fully deterministic universe, or at the very least consciousness and that which it affects has to be non-deterministic. There must not be an equation possible that could describe it. So then why is that incompatible with Star Trek style teleportation?
If there is no way to determine consciousness then there is no way to ensure whatever you have ‘copied’ is the same thing as what you are ‘pasting.’ You are indeed killing a person, then recreating their flesh suit in hopes ‘they’ go along with it. Without understanding consciousness better, which would require understanding (but clearly not being able to mathematically describe) a non-deterministic system, there would be no possible way to ensure this new creation of yours could ever be the same entity.
Free will, presumably, is the ability to choose. Or at the very least the ability to change an action from a predetermined course.
If consciousness derives from a series of physical interactions, i.e. you are just a set of electrochemical reactions that follow deterministic (i.e. unchanging no matter how many times it happens) physics, you cannot change anything. Every thought that you have ever thought was determined before electrons formed in the universe. Every single action the collection of waves and particles you arbitrarily call ‘you’ happened all at once at the start of the universe, we’re just seeing it happen slowly.
If consciousness is deterministic, there is no concept of free will, you are in the middle of a mathematical formula being solved, nothing more or less. You have no ability to change your fate, or choose anything. Even your reaction to this idea was determined before the universe was cold enough for light to exist.
Therefore, we should hope consciousness, if nothing else in the universe, is not deterministic. That there is no ability to stop or restart it here. That there isn’t a way to copy it, or paste it. Otherwise no human has ever chosen anything, even a single thought in their head.
Strictly speaking, sure, but for all intents and purposes, you can still have practical free will in a deterministic universe. If a system is chaotic enough (which a human brain is almost certainly going to be), it may be theoretically possible to predict what a person is going to do, but it will always be practically impossible to actually do so.
We never say that the weather is perfectly predictable, yet it’s clearly driven by purely deterministic mechanisms
The problem with chaos theory and its ilk is it’s frame of reference is so pathetically human.
No, humans even with computer aid will not be able to predict a sufficiently chaotic system, but that doesn’t mean its not predictable.
That’s the definition of deterministic. That given infinite compute time and an accurate starting state, and accurate formulas, you are able to calculate the totality of any single point of time in that system. In other words, if the universe were a single equation, i.e. Δe=(mc²)t and you knew the starting values of e, m, and c; you could fill in the t(ime) and figure out the Δe at any point in time.
That fact doesn’t change if there are a infinite number of items in the formula, or even infinite formulas – there will never be any other outcome to those equations than what was set in motion at the start of the universe. Free will, i.e. true deviation from determinism, cannot exist in a deterministic universe. Without deviation from determinism, without free will, we are not participants in the universe. We are observers. We cannot change any thing, even how we think about the fact we are observers.
Every thought you’re having right now, in a deterministic universe, was determined the second the universe started. Every action you’ve taken, including writing this comment, was set in stone. There was never a single thing you could do to change it, there was never anything else that would have ever happened, there is no variance with these starting conditions that this universe started with.
If you are just the result of mathematical formulas being resolved in real time, you cannot change the variables. You aren’t part of setting the equation. You are a blip in it being solved.
For most people, that’s depressing. For some people, this being proven will cause them to kill themselves, which would have been again set in stone before the Earth was formed. For anyone this should be distressing, unless, of course, you were programmed at the start of the universe to not find it distressing and just be okay with being an unwilling actor in a movie recorded before the concept of light existed.
I don’t disagree with you, but it seems you’ve missed the point that I was trying to make. Yes, sure, the future has been predetermined in a deterministic universe. But if no person in that universe can ever figure out what that future is going to be, is there any practical distinction? To any entity within the universe, the future is completely unknown - the only thing that can be said for sure is that there is going to be a future. That is what I mean when I say that there can exist a practical free will in a deterministic universe
In my eyes, any person who would feel dread over whether or not free will exists in a deterministic universe is splitting hairs over a thought experiment where all outcomes are practically equivalent
Yes, sure, the future has been predetermined in a deterministic universe. But if no person in that universe can ever figure out what that future is going to be, is there any practical distinction?
Yes.
Yes there is.
Even if I don’t know the answer to an equation I can be reasonably sure that the equation will not change half way through working it out. To someone theoretically conscious in the middle of said equation, their ignorance of the outcome does not change the fact the outcome for them does not depend on their feeling about it.
To that ignorant internal observer there is no effective difference, but that’s worse in my opinion. Being delusional that you have a choice in anything you do despite any outside observer being able to tell you you don’t. This does not enable free will, this only causes the delusion of free will. One must imagine characters in a book would have this delusion, if they existed in some form.
Again in a deterministic universe we are akin to those book characters, not the author. No matter what happens we have not written the next page. We have had no influence on the next page. We are simply ignorant of that page until it is read by time, or rather until our limited ability to observe catches up with the next page. To us as those characters we wouldn’t know we don’t have free will, but this doesn’t mean it exists. It is written already regardless.
Which would be terrible, genuinely speaking. Proving that to yourself in what is essentially suicide from anything other than a deterministic viewpoint is an extreme most will simply never do.
Most people do not accept nor want to think that they are merely watching a movie. Most people want to believe they have struggled. That they have suffered. That they have overcome that suffering. That their choices lead, at least in part, to the success or failure of the things in their life.
Without free will, the concept of choice does not exist. Struggle and suffering were built in. Whether or not you got through it has nothing to do with you. You have not accomplished anything, you will never accomplish anything. Not that there is a meaningful definition of ‘You’ in a purely deterministic universe; anymore than there is a definition of the viewer of a movie from the universe within that movie.
Because then that means free will can’t exist.
Deterministic universes disallow any concept of free will or variance beyond what was calculated at the very femtosecond the universe started. Nothing is possible except what has happened and will happen.
There’s nothing in free will that would prevent this though. I’m confused how you get to this conclusion.
How do you change an equation from within said equation?
Equation? Is that what you think existance is?
That is what deterministic reality means. And if you can exactly replicate a consciousness, that is the indication we’re in an deterministic universe.
Don’t see how you get your conclusion from the premise.
The other comments go over it more thoroughly but let’s more directly connect it to this idea; specifically this post is talking about Star Trek rules for teleportation.
This type of teleportation is that your body is scanned down to the exact spin of every quantum particle and wave, then it is destroyed entirely, and turned into energy by one machine. This information is encoded in a data stream that can be saved, stored, and reused at any point. Then. Somewhere else, a different machine reads that data, and fully recreates you down to the spin in the quantum particles making up the arbitrary concept of ‘you.’
In order for data to be stored or retrieved it has to be unchanging, predictable. If every time you opened your company’s spreadsheets they changed randomly one would assume something is terribly wrong somewhere in the system. This essentially means that by some method you are able to determine the exact ‘data’ involved at any give point.
When we extend this to ‘consciousness,’ we then have the natural consequence of these facts being that consciousness itself is determinable. That there is some set of predictable things that can be done to generate a person that believes they are conscious. If there is truly no difference between the person that was killed, and the person that was made, then the natural consequence of this is consciousness itself is deterministic, i.e. there is a set of predictable interactions that given infinite time and infinite resources you could compute.
If, then, there is a predictable set of interactions that can form consciousness; then like all other predictable interactions we would be able to trace its start, its source of these interactions to the start of the universe. Which would mean there is no possible variance of what could have happened. 1 + 1 will always equal 2. Every single time. We can derive that to mean a + b will always equal c. Which if true, would mean that given the exact starting point of all energy in the universe, we can perfectly predict, or recreate, the universe.
This has the logical consequence of meaning there is no other outcome than what has happened; and what will happen has already been determined. This isn’t just the generality of ‘fate’ or ‘destiny,’ this is down to every single specific micro interaction, including your thoughts.
In this world, should it exist, the fact you read this comment was determined at the start of the universe. Name a struggle ‘you’ overcame. You couldn’t have failed at it. You didn’t struggle. You were always going to do exactly whatever you did. You didn’t have a choice to fail. You didn’t have a choice, period. You didn’t achieve anything. You can’t achieve things, because achievement implies an alternative. You don’t have the luxury of alternatives in a deterministic universe. Everything will always play out exactly the same, no matter how many times the underlying equations of the universe are solved.
Consciousness being deterministic, as evidenced by being able to be perfectly copied and arbitrarily pasted, means that there is no choice involved in life. That no choices have ever been made. By anyone. At any time. And never will be. I didn’t choose to write this comment. You didn’t choose to read it. Your thoughts about it are not yours, just the result of an electrochemical reaction that is a small part of the equations that started this universe. You literally can’t choose to act on them and reply, whether or not you reply was decided for you before light as a concept happened to form in the universe.
Free will, as a concept, posits exactly one thing. That an individual entity with free will can choose something. That they are not being led along a predetermined track with no ability to simply stop and get off. This concept is entirely at odds with a deterministic universe, as no choice can be made once the universe ‘starts.’
So, in order for free will to exist, we cannot be in a fully deterministic universe, or at the very least consciousness and that which it affects has to be non-deterministic. There must not be an equation possible that could describe it. So then why is that incompatible with Star Trek style teleportation?
If there is no way to determine consciousness then there is no way to ensure whatever you have ‘copied’ is the same thing as what you are ‘pasting.’ You are indeed killing a person, then recreating their flesh suit in hopes ‘they’ go along with it. Without understanding consciousness better, which would require understanding (but clearly not being able to mathematically describe) a non-deterministic system, there would be no possible way to ensure this new creation of yours could ever be the same entity.
I don’t see how no free will follows from “consciousness can be cut and pasted” but I also don’t know what difference it makes for me.
Free will, presumably, is the ability to choose. Or at the very least the ability to change an action from a predetermined course.
If consciousness derives from a series of physical interactions, i.e. you are just a set of electrochemical reactions that follow deterministic (i.e. unchanging no matter how many times it happens) physics, you cannot change anything. Every thought that you have ever thought was determined before electrons formed in the universe. Every single action the collection of waves and particles you arbitrarily call ‘you’ happened all at once at the start of the universe, we’re just seeing it happen slowly.
If consciousness is deterministic, there is no concept of free will, you are in the middle of a mathematical formula being solved, nothing more or less. You have no ability to change your fate, or choose anything. Even your reaction to this idea was determined before the universe was cold enough for light to exist.
Therefore, we should hope consciousness, if nothing else in the universe, is not deterministic. That there is no ability to stop or restart it here. That there isn’t a way to copy it, or paste it. Otherwise no human has ever chosen anything, even a single thought in their head.
Strictly speaking, sure, but for all intents and purposes, you can still have practical free will in a deterministic universe. If a system is chaotic enough (which a human brain is almost certainly going to be), it may be theoretically possible to predict what a person is going to do, but it will always be practically impossible to actually do so.
We never say that the weather is perfectly predictable, yet it’s clearly driven by purely deterministic mechanisms
The problem with chaos theory and its ilk is it’s frame of reference is so pathetically human.
No, humans even with computer aid will not be able to predict a sufficiently chaotic system, but that doesn’t mean its not predictable.
That’s the definition of deterministic. That given infinite compute time and an accurate starting state, and accurate formulas, you are able to calculate the totality of any single point of time in that system. In other words, if the universe were a single equation, i.e. Δe=(mc²)t and you knew the starting values of e, m, and c; you could fill in the t(ime) and figure out the Δe at any point in time.
That fact doesn’t change if there are a infinite number of items in the formula, or even infinite formulas – there will never be any other outcome to those equations than what was set in motion at the start of the universe. Free will, i.e. true deviation from determinism, cannot exist in a deterministic universe. Without deviation from determinism, without free will, we are not participants in the universe. We are observers. We cannot change any thing, even how we think about the fact we are observers.
Every thought you’re having right now, in a deterministic universe, was determined the second the universe started. Every action you’ve taken, including writing this comment, was set in stone. There was never a single thing you could do to change it, there was never anything else that would have ever happened, there is no variance with these starting conditions that this universe started with.
If you are just the result of mathematical formulas being resolved in real time, you cannot change the variables. You aren’t part of setting the equation. You are a blip in it being solved.
For most people, that’s depressing. For some people, this being proven will cause them to kill themselves, which would have been again set in stone before the Earth was formed. For anyone this should be distressing, unless, of course, you were programmed at the start of the universe to not find it distressing and just be okay with being an unwilling actor in a movie recorded before the concept of light existed.
I don’t disagree with you, but it seems you’ve missed the point that I was trying to make. Yes, sure, the future has been predetermined in a deterministic universe. But if no person in that universe can ever figure out what that future is going to be, is there any practical distinction? To any entity within the universe, the future is completely unknown - the only thing that can be said for sure is that there is going to be a future. That is what I mean when I say that there can exist a practical free will in a deterministic universe
In my eyes, any person who would feel dread over whether or not free will exists in a deterministic universe is splitting hairs over a thought experiment where all outcomes are practically equivalent
Yes.
Yes there is.
Even if I don’t know the answer to an equation I can be reasonably sure that the equation will not change half way through working it out. To someone theoretically conscious in the middle of said equation, their ignorance of the outcome does not change the fact the outcome for them does not depend on their feeling about it.
To that ignorant internal observer there is no effective difference, but that’s worse in my opinion. Being delusional that you have a choice in anything you do despite any outside observer being able to tell you you don’t. This does not enable free will, this only causes the delusion of free will. One must imagine characters in a book would have this delusion, if they existed in some form.
Again in a deterministic universe we are akin to those book characters, not the author. No matter what happens we have not written the next page. We have had no influence on the next page. We are simply ignorant of that page until it is read by time, or rather until our limited ability to observe catches up with the next page. To us as those characters we wouldn’t know we don’t have free will, but this doesn’t mean it exists. It is written already regardless.
We don’t know if free will exists. Maybe it just doesn’t
Which would be terrible, genuinely speaking. Proving that to yourself in what is essentially suicide from anything other than a deterministic viewpoint is an extreme most will simply never do.
Most people do not accept nor want to think that they are merely watching a movie. Most people want to believe they have struggled. That they have suffered. That they have overcome that suffering. That their choices lead, at least in part, to the success or failure of the things in their life.
Without free will, the concept of choice does not exist. Struggle and suffering were built in. Whether or not you got through it has nothing to do with you. You have not accomplished anything, you will never accomplish anything. Not that there is a meaningful definition of ‘You’ in a purely deterministic universe; anymore than there is a definition of the viewer of a movie from the universe within that movie.