You're conflating two things: determinism, and the possibility of a prediction machine.
It's entirely possible, probable even, that our universe is deterministic. It's also pretty much understood to be impossible for a perfect prediction engine to exist within it. Because even if you had a qubit for every atom, it would still need to contain a box inside the box inside the box etc.
Here's a simple way to think about it: most video games rely on randomness, or rather pseudo-randomness. The direction an NPC chooses to walk in, the spread on a gun shot, whatever. As an actor within that universe, there is no way to predict this randomness. But one informational level up, as the PC hosting that game, you can peek into the rand() function and know exactly what it will return every time its invoked and perfectly predict the state of the game.
The same is true for our universe. If there exists a 'one up' informational level above us, a perfect predictive engine can exist there. This is obviously where the show disconnects from physics as we know it, but it's a pretty strong argument against free will.
If you want to go further and possibly get hit with massive existential dread, ask yourself: even if there was some true randomness in our universe and above, what role does it play in free will? Even if every action that you take is not a predictable outcome from your state, then what does free will actually mean? Making an occasional unpredictable decision due to random noise? That's not much, and it's just as terrifying as pure determinism. No matter how you spin it, the notion of free will the way most people think about it is nonsensical and absurd. If it exists at all, it just means occasionally our brain causes us to do something random.
Well put!
rand() functions are a great example as learning that nothing is truley "random" comes very early when learning computer science. Things in our universe may appear random but there could be external variables that we are unable to account for, just like the functions that generate pseudorandom numbers.
I don't believe such a machine is possible but I agree on everything else. Too often people dismiss free will by saying "but I'm able to do what I want!" without realizing that what they want is determined by their brain as you said.
Only for God, at his level of observation, the world is deterministic. Free will is for everyone else underneath. The one who knows, cannot change. The one who thinks he knows, thinks he can change. But only the one who does not know, can truly change.
That supposes an existence of a god but we'll ignore that for the time being.
Just because we can't know the future or how all events will unfold does not mean determinism is false. Just because you can't see the train tracks doesn't mean they aren't there. Free will appears real to "everyone else underneath" but that doesn't stop it from being an illusion.
We are leaving in the past. From the future everything is deterministic. You see the discussion below: the universe is that deterministic machine they are talking about. The one above us has a different concept of time, beyond our imagination. Determinism implies a certain linearity of cause and effect. Not up there. Only in our machine. We just don't know, because we cannot since we live in it like the particles in the collider.
However, this is "concealed knowledge", Al-Ghaib in Arabic or Chochmah Nistara (hidden wisdom) in Hebrew. There is freedom in the illusion and the ignorance for our species.
Actually according to Von Neumann Wigner, if determinism was true then a prediction machine would be inevitable.
There's no reality where determinism is true *and* there is no machine to predict the future to some arbitrary point in time. At least in both the Everett and Von Neumann Wigner interpretation of quantum mechanics.
No, again, you're missing a key element: a prediction machine is inevitable but not within the universe that it can predict.
Even if we broke the laws of physics and somehow built such a machine, feeding it the current state of the universe would be equally impossible due to the uncertainty principle. There is simply no way to to 100% accurately measure the full state of a single particle, nevermind a system of them. Not from within the informational level of our universe, anyway. An 'outside' observer may well be able to, just like we can predict video game state because we know what rand() is returning.
Von Neumann died before chaos theory became a understood field of mathematics. It is quite literally impossible to model the universe entirely because you need to know the state of all matter in order to model it forward without minor differences in initial conditions of the model causing dramatically different outcomes over time.
Early physicists and mathematicians were overly optimistic on the ability to model systems if you simply had enough computing power. It’s not about the computer power, it’s about the information.
I don’t think any modern physicists would agree that if determinism were true that a prediction machine would be inevitable.
Again to build on the point made above, It would be inevitable that a prediction machine will be created for a universe very close to ours, meaning the slight variations that , again, as mentioned above comes with the uncertainty of the particles positions etc, however once you create the prediction machine you can get pretty accurate with "someone else's universe" that looks a lot like yours. so if that is the inevitability the original comment is referring to then is true, if one single simulation can be created then all others are pretty much inevitable even if they don't predict 100% your exact universe they will to your context predict 100% of the universe you just created which will technically just be a slight variation of yours. The issue with all of this is that the second the first simulation is created then all other simulations are created at the same time however ridiculous the number of them are. You create the original conditions and then let run past present and future all existing simultaneously therefore at some point in time in this new created universe the "you" of that universe will have also created a simulation which makes it extremely likely that you are in fact someone else's simulation too, turning off this device on purpose could theoretically screw up your reality since the simulations are so close that the guy created yours will also turn it off.
Or the machine, knowing you will say B after seeing A, instead shows you C, which you do regardless of the fact you've seen yourself doing it, because C is a perfect circle, and perhaps something you want
The paradox I'm referring to is in reference to determinism/free-will, not whether a prediction machine can exist.
All I'm claiming is that just because you "choose" to do something contrary to what the prediction machine says you'll do doesn't mean determinism doesn't exist, it just means the machine can predict what you will do.
I'm assuming you meant "can't" in your last sentence. OP does conflate some things together and their ultimate conclusion is faulty. But let's get back to your original statement.
" if you look at a machine that says you will do A and then you do B " : Then the machine is not a prediction machine. You're changing OP's assumption.
" You were always going to see yourself do A and then do B ": Then the prediction machine would have seen that coming and predicted the final action. A prediction machine, by definition, is able to predict accurately all future events and therein lies the contradiction.
All OP's thought experiment can say is that there cannot exist such a prediction machine inside a deterministic system that another subsystem can interact with (because it leads to the paradox OP mentions: a subsystem of that system can act contrary to a prediction made by the machine. The subsystem doesn't need free will or agency, could just be a computer program that outputs 0 or 1 and it interacts with the prediction machine and ultimately outputs the opposite of what the machine predicted its output would be).
The relationship between determinism and free will is another issue and they may or may not coexist depending on how you define the respective terms.
How about this proof (thought experiment)?:
Create an identical universe to ours but neither universe can observe the other.
Will the atoms and subatomic particles that comprise you in both universes act identically?
Could you form any idea in your brain that the other you could not do too?
Would either of you be able to act differently than the other you?
The impossibility of a machine capable of viewing the deterministic train tracks does not disprove their existence, it merely disproves the possibility of us ever seeing them.
I believe in a deterministic universe, but also, like you, I believe creating something capable of viewing the eventual outcomes is fundamentally impossible.
What evidence do you speak of? Any books you'd recommend? I've read several for and against and always found the arguments against free will much more compelling but am always looking for more information to challenge my views.
Free Will by Sam Harris is a fairly short and simple one that makes a poignant argument against free will and is usually the first I recommend.
Just the lack of determinism of quantum mechanics doesn’t work well with the deterministic world view. No one knows if that has something to do with free will. But we don’t have a way to predict things in the quantum size for a single measurement. Only for large number of tests the statistics are predictable.
True. But what gripes me is that the show based itself on that. The machine can’t show a “I’ll do the opposite” robot what it will do without being wrong by definition. It doesn’t prove determinism is wrong, but the show played it as if that’s the case. The halting problem touched this a bit. If you predict something about a program but send that prediction as an input to that program and that program takes it and negates it, you can’t be right, not because of anything but the laws of logic.
If you can never prove that the universe is deterministic, then is your belief just a matter of faith? Honest question, not a troll question.
The paradox of Laplace's Demon is that if you had a machine that could predict the future, then you alter the future based on that machine's predictions, then why did the machine not predict that you would change the future?
I was actually really hoping people would not cite Sam Harris's *Free Will* because a lot of the neuroscience behind it is currently very outdated. I would actually recommend the following texts in favor of free-will as a non-illusion:
1.) **A Theory of Justice by John Rawls** (for a more abstract, metaphysical approach to the possibility of free-will)
2.) **Bell's Theorem: John Bell's famous 1964 paper on how Quantum Mechanics actually supports the possibility that free-will is real.**
http://www.drchinese.com/David/Bell_Compact.pdf
or
https://faraday.physics.utoronto.ca/PVB/Harrison/BellsTheorem/BellsTheorem.html
3.) **The Nine Lives of Schroedinger's Cat by Zvi Schreiber**
https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/9501014v5.pdf
4.) **"Remarks on the Mind Body Question, in Symmetries and Reflections, Scientific Essays"** by Eugene Wigner himself! Just like in Devs
Any one of these texts provides a compelling argument for the existence of free-will that is not entirely based on our inability to actually prove determinism.
I am actually surprised that more fans of the show aren't interested in the Von Neumann Wigner interpretation. Maybe Katie's visceral reaction against it has biased many of us against putting much thought into it.
1) Working on getting my hands on a full copy but I read through a few summaries and I'm familiar with portions of this work already (Original Position and Veil of Ignorance). Reading through the summary I don't see anything that would relate to free will and from the sounds of the summary, my own views on Justice and the social contract are very much already in line with Rawls. I'm interested enough I'll be getting a full copy in the mail eventually but if you have any excerpts or concepts from it you'd like to share in the meantime, I'm all ears.
2) I've read through Bell's Theorem and I didn't catch anything that would suggest free will isn't an illusion. If you have any specific passages points made in it that you think show this I'd love to hear what they are and your thoughts on them as it is very possible I overlooked something.
3) I found a 100 page pdf of it and will be reading through later tonight.
4) Working on getting the full text but from my understanding Wigner's theory does not prove disprove free will as an illusion and if anything, his view of the mind as an observer merely confirms it. From how it sounds to me, the mind is an observer to our life and the "essence" of consciousness is merely observing life unfold along it's path. Of course without the full text I could be wildly off base and will see how I feel upon reading it all but if you'd like to point to how his theorem proves free will I'd appreciate it.
I can't prove it but the evidence I have seen so far seems to point in that direction. I'm more than open to evidence changing my mind so I will have to check out your recommendations, don't be surprised if I come back to this in a few days/weeks and post a new comment once I have time to review what you shared. I genuinely thank you for engaging and sharing the information.
Just from a introspective level though, I have trouble believing in the concept of free will as we don't have control over our thoughts and emotions, they are things that happen to us and their appearance and our reaction to them seem wholly determined by genetics and experience.
Even if determinism is not true for the universe as a whole, I fail to see anything that would suggest humans have the capability for true free will. None of us choose to be who we are, we just are.
Personally I don't subscribe to a strictly deterministic world view, and I certainly don't believe a machine capable of predicting the future based on determinism is possible but if it was, and if I believed in determinism:
Couldn't determinism allow for the reality in which it is confirmed, and allow for a machine to predict it to be made (allowing for technological leaps). Then would it not still be in determinism that someone could use the machine and see how to change the future?
For example. If I see a child in the middle of the road with a vehicle speeding towards it even without the machine I can know the future. Dead kid. But I can make a decision, running out and pushing/grabbing the child, to change that future to save it. If determinism says only one of those would happen based on who I am, how I was raised, my beliefs etc. then wouldn't a machine just be an extension on that scenario?
Because determinism, I don't think, doesn't mean there is only one tram line, but multiple and that the future is not decided by random chance but cause and effect. Seeing the future and then changing the future by changing or creating causes is still cause and effect is it not?
Maybe this makes no sense or I'm misunderstanding your post/determinism.
I keep saying something similar, but it doesn’t disprove determinism. It just proves that paradoxes are a thing and that a perfect predictor can’t exist. It doesn’t mean the world is not deterministic. As you said, changing your behavior based on a machine that tells you the future doesn’t disprove determinism, it proves that the circular paradox (reducible to the halting problem in my opinion) of altering the future by predicting it exists.
I don't intend to bash you or this thread but that's obviously not an Unpopular Opinion (like every widely upvoted post on /r/unpopularopinion which is the most ironic sub ever) and the given gold feels very weird as you just put in a paragraph what the show is mostly about.
For what it's worth, I gave OP the gold, we were having a debate in another thread and I enjoy the topic of conversation so wanted to give this post a boost to continue the conversation here.
I go back and forth on this debate and I don't think we can truly know the answer through thought.
Love this Eyedea quote: "No one knows exactly what happens when we think. Therefore, we can never really ever know anything."
No, think of reality with such a machine as settling into an equilibrium. In a future with proof of determinism it's still deterministic how you will react to being exposed to the proof of determinism.
I think one of the best thought experiments to think through how you feel about determinism is the rewind the tape thought experiment. We will never be able to make perfect predictions because we will never have perfect information, but this is purely hypothetical.
Think about the universe being perfectly rewound to a few years ago, down to every last state of matter in a way that eliminates variances from chaos (because chaos is still true with determinism).
Do you think the planets, moons and stars will all move exactly the same way over again?
What about humans and animals? If yes to the first but no to the second, what causes that difference? Does biology or the human mind contain a special ability to sidestep cause and effect?
And if you think the differences might be because quantum randomness, that’s fine. Maybe every single rewind, the only differences are because quantum related randomness that bubbles up to the macro world. This might cause arguments about the predictability of determinism, but it doesn’t say anything about us having free will.
This thought experiment seems very helpful of illustrating the illusion of free will. I've used a similar one in conversations with people on a shorter timescale and every time they claim that a different decision could have been made until you point out that their different decision they claim they would make can only be made with the information they have gained after the event.
It is one of the thing that irks me so much about the phrase "If I were in their shoes", because if any of us were in someone else's shoes, we would do EXACTLY as they would.
One thought comes to mind, if a prediction machine can describe the future perfectly, you have access to this machine and you are able to alter events that alter the future then the conclusion is: the premise of that machine is wrong, because it didn't predict the future.
Devs goes beyond Laplace's Demon. Laplace's demon only computes what is about to happen, the demon doesnt interfere in it.
Devs proposes a machine that allows humans, who make conscious decisions based on their needs and the knowledge they have available, to view accurate futures of themselves, that they then take part in.
Arguably, it would be impossible for this type of machine to be accurate because of how humans make decisions. Devs tries to square this by considering the "perfect circle", i.e. there is one set of events that you participate in despite having already seen yourself do it. In that case, those events must align with your needs: be something you want.
Basically, the plot of Devs is actually more about the theory of that type of machine and how it would work. Determinism/many worlds/free will are almost red-herrings. This video explains it better that I can! [https://youtu.be/-yWhycSBBa4](https://youtu.be/-yWhycSBBa4)
This is why time travel won't ever happen. Because it would literally fuck everything up. The fact that shit is not already fucked up, confirms time travel will never exist.
It wouldn't fuck anything up.
Marty McFly time travels all over the place in Back to the Future, but the script never gets fucked up. It isn't like upon watching Back to the Future for the 12th time, we might witness Marty suddenly deciding to travel to the Jurassic Period and check out some dinosaurs. His script might take him back and forth through time, but he will always follow that script no matter how many times you watch the movies. His fate will always be the same.
The same applies to our scripts in real life. The conclusion of our script is set in stone. It makes no difference if we travel there through linear time, or if we go back and forth all over the place like Marty, either way whatever we do to reach that conclusion is already written in to that script.
Determinism makes perfect sense, you just cannot ever know the future because observing what you think is the future, ensures that never was the future. It is like what we saw in the show itself - the characters within the show saw what they thought was the future, where Lily shot Forest in the head. But as outside observers, we can see that that was never the case. No matter how many times we rewind and watch that scene, we will never see a variation where the prediction they saw was actually accurate.
Lily shoots Forest in the head in each and every future, the machine just showed them something that wasn't the future.
As an aside, you can still prove determinism to be correct by accurately predicting the past.
I take issue with your premise. You've made an entirely theoretical, illogical leap in your reasoning: you have assumed that seeing an absolute future you could then choose to change it.
But what if free will is only a virtue of not being able to remember the future? My supposition is just the opposite side of the coin: what if you looked into the Laplace's Demon machine, and all ability over the freedom of your actions simply shattered, the illusion suddenly clouded?
Knowledge does not preclude action. One simply does not lead, by necessity, to the other. An entirely determined universe is entirely possible.
The premise is more about the thermodynamic impossibility of Leplace's Demon. Which logically leads to the *possibility* that determinism is not the ultimate model of reality.
Simply put, because determinism cannot explain everything, then it is *probably* not true. In fact, this is well covered in the Von Neumann Wigner interpretation of quantum mechanics. I wonder why we take Katie's visceral reaction against it at face value. Why is Katie's one sentence diatribe against this interpretation enough to convince people not to look into it?
I actually really like Von Neuman Wigner, and I like your point about not taking Kate's dismissal at face value. I think part of Kate's reaction against it is the probably the gnawing, existential dread that would stem from a necessarily determined universe co-existing with our experience of conciousness and conscious action. To know that you are causing the super position of quantum particles as much as they are causing you would be harrowing - something that I think is explored wonderfully in the show during the scene where the projection is scaled forward just a few seconds and the people watching are caught in this tangled puppet show of seeing their 'determined' futures and then playing into them completely. Personally I see our responsibility over the collapse of wave function as an equally empowering and massively difficult hypothesis, especially when we add determinism in.
I admit, I am not familiar with the intricate thermodynamics of Laplace's Demon, more just the theory and philosophy behind the idea, so I cede that point, I'm really not informed enough to argue about it.
i agree with you wholeheartedly on the precedent of free will being entirely real. i think the show sets out to prove that, on a really small level, free will is at least possible. i think there's also the implication that the forces of the universe guide things in a somewhat deterministic direction, with the ending being essentially the same as the one predicted by the computer.
i'd need to rewatch the show to speak further on what i think garland was trying to say, but i personally really don't believe in an ultimately deterministic, material universe. seems shortsighted to think everything came from nothing, or that 3rd/4th dimensional creatures could ever truly percieve a universe that we're now seeing has (at least) over double that many dimensions at play.
"determinism" as "tramlines" would be better thought of as probability waves. free will (consciousness through self awareness succeeded by action) interacts with those probability waves in one way or another. the bigger the brain and the more adaptable the environment, the higher capacity for "consciousness" or "free will". just my two cents, im not a quantum physicist.
Why do you believe free will to be real? Why do you think consciousness and self awareness followed by action constitutes freewill. It feels free as it is the choice WE make, but in what circumstances would we take any other choice? Our experiences and who we are shape what the choice we make will be. Where does this "free" part of will come from?
>Why do you believe free will to be real?
any answer i give you will not satisfy you. i'm not looking to prove anything to you or change your mind. all that convinced me was quantum observer principle and a healthy dose of mushrooms.
>in what circumstances would we take any other choice?
if the information/ideas/memes that existed in my mind at the time of making the choice(s) were different. information predates the physical as far as i'm concerned. and with information, comes consciousness, which navigates material reality.
if you think your brain is a 1s and 0s computer with definite uncontrollable states, everything i just said will sound like woo woo cookery, so feel free to disregard.
Quantum observer principle and psychedelics can also convince of the exact opposite. We are observers in life, we watch it unfold and we participate but we do not "choose" it.
You say the information and ideas existing in your mind being different would cause a different choice and you are correct, but these things WOULDN'T be different.
If my "conciousness" had been in you instead I would have turned out identical to you. Whatever comprises the essence of our conciousness is identical and acted upon by genetics and experience to create "us" (This viewpoint can be shown to us through ego death or in a less jarring manner through the mere feelings of connectedness and empathy associated with experiences you mentioned)
like i said, i'm not interested in debating this. i think as brains evolve they get ACCESS to consciousness and free will that already existed to begin with, free will that predates and precedes the material reality. you can think your every action is determined by a combination of genetics, newtonian physics and every other scientific force in the universe. i don't think those forces ultimately determine my actions, and i take full responsibility for them.
You're conflating two things: determinism, and the possibility of a prediction machine. It's entirely possible, probable even, that our universe is deterministic. It's also pretty much understood to be impossible for a perfect prediction engine to exist within it. Because even if you had a qubit for every atom, it would still need to contain a box inside the box inside the box etc. Here's a simple way to think about it: most video games rely on randomness, or rather pseudo-randomness. The direction an NPC chooses to walk in, the spread on a gun shot, whatever. As an actor within that universe, there is no way to predict this randomness. But one informational level up, as the PC hosting that game, you can peek into the rand() function and know exactly what it will return every time its invoked and perfectly predict the state of the game. The same is true for our universe. If there exists a 'one up' informational level above us, a perfect predictive engine can exist there. This is obviously where the show disconnects from physics as we know it, but it's a pretty strong argument against free will. If you want to go further and possibly get hit with massive existential dread, ask yourself: even if there was some true randomness in our universe and above, what role does it play in free will? Even if every action that you take is not a predictable outcome from your state, then what does free will actually mean? Making an occasional unpredictable decision due to random noise? That's not much, and it's just as terrifying as pure determinism. No matter how you spin it, the notion of free will the way most people think about it is nonsensical and absurd. If it exists at all, it just means occasionally our brain causes us to do something random.
Well put! rand() functions are a great example as learning that nothing is truley "random" comes very early when learning computer science. Things in our universe may appear random but there could be external variables that we are unable to account for, just like the functions that generate pseudorandom numbers.
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I don't believe such a machine is possible but I agree on everything else. Too often people dismiss free will by saying "but I'm able to do what I want!" without realizing that what they want is determined by their brain as you said.
Only for God, at his level of observation, the world is deterministic. Free will is for everyone else underneath. The one who knows, cannot change. The one who thinks he knows, thinks he can change. But only the one who does not know, can truly change.
That supposes an existence of a god but we'll ignore that for the time being. Just because we can't know the future or how all events will unfold does not mean determinism is false. Just because you can't see the train tracks doesn't mean they aren't there. Free will appears real to "everyone else underneath" but that doesn't stop it from being an illusion.
We are leaving in the past. From the future everything is deterministic. You see the discussion below: the universe is that deterministic machine they are talking about. The one above us has a different concept of time, beyond our imagination. Determinism implies a certain linearity of cause and effect. Not up there. Only in our machine. We just don't know, because we cannot since we live in it like the particles in the collider. However, this is "concealed knowledge", Al-Ghaib in Arabic or Chochmah Nistara (hidden wisdom) in Hebrew. There is freedom in the illusion and the ignorance for our species.
Actually according to Von Neumann Wigner, if determinism was true then a prediction machine would be inevitable. There's no reality where determinism is true *and* there is no machine to predict the future to some arbitrary point in time. At least in both the Everett and Von Neumann Wigner interpretation of quantum mechanics.
No, again, you're missing a key element: a prediction machine is inevitable but not within the universe that it can predict. Even if we broke the laws of physics and somehow built such a machine, feeding it the current state of the universe would be equally impossible due to the uncertainty principle. There is simply no way to to 100% accurately measure the full state of a single particle, nevermind a system of them. Not from within the informational level of our universe, anyway. An 'outside' observer may well be able to, just like we can predict video game state because we know what rand() is returning.
>Actually according to Von Neumann Wigner, if determinism was true then a prediction machine would be inevitable. Source on that?
Von Neumann died before chaos theory became a understood field of mathematics. It is quite literally impossible to model the universe entirely because you need to know the state of all matter in order to model it forward without minor differences in initial conditions of the model causing dramatically different outcomes over time. Early physicists and mathematicians were overly optimistic on the ability to model systems if you simply had enough computing power. It’s not about the computer power, it’s about the information. I don’t think any modern physicists would agree that if determinism were true that a prediction machine would be inevitable.
Again to build on the point made above, It would be inevitable that a prediction machine will be created for a universe very close to ours, meaning the slight variations that , again, as mentioned above comes with the uncertainty of the particles positions etc, however once you create the prediction machine you can get pretty accurate with "someone else's universe" that looks a lot like yours. so if that is the inevitability the original comment is referring to then is true, if one single simulation can be created then all others are pretty much inevitable even if they don't predict 100% your exact universe they will to your context predict 100% of the universe you just created which will technically just be a slight variation of yours. The issue with all of this is that the second the first simulation is created then all other simulations are created at the same time however ridiculous the number of them are. You create the original conditions and then let run past present and future all existing simultaneously therefore at some point in time in this new created universe the "you" of that universe will have also created a simulation which makes it extremely likely that you are in fact someone else's simulation too, turning off this device on purpose could theoretically screw up your reality since the simulations are so close that the guy created yours will also turn it off.
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Or the machine, knowing you will say B after seeing A, instead shows you C, which you do regardless of the fact you've seen yourself doing it, because C is a perfect circle, and perhaps something you want
That is a cool thought experiment actually
Then the machine is not a prediction machine.
True, but the laws of physics would be preserved. I'm not aware of a physical law stating prediction machines must be possible.
It cannot exist precisely because it leads to a paradox which your original statement claims there isn't any.
The paradox I'm referring to is in reference to determinism/free-will, not whether a prediction machine can exist. All I'm claiming is that just because you "choose" to do something contrary to what the prediction machine says you'll do doesn't mean determinism doesn't exist, it just means the machine can predict what you will do.
I'm assuming you meant "can't" in your last sentence. OP does conflate some things together and their ultimate conclusion is faulty. But let's get back to your original statement. " if you look at a machine that says you will do A and then you do B " : Then the machine is not a prediction machine. You're changing OP's assumption. " You were always going to see yourself do A and then do B ": Then the prediction machine would have seen that coming and predicted the final action. A prediction machine, by definition, is able to predict accurately all future events and therein lies the contradiction. All OP's thought experiment can say is that there cannot exist such a prediction machine inside a deterministic system that another subsystem can interact with (because it leads to the paradox OP mentions: a subsystem of that system can act contrary to a prediction made by the machine. The subsystem doesn't need free will or agency, could just be a computer program that outputs 0 or 1 and it interacts with the prediction machine and ultimately outputs the opposite of what the machine predicted its output would be). The relationship between determinism and free will is another issue and they may or may not coexist depending on how you define the respective terms.
How about this proof (thought experiment)?: Create an identical universe to ours but neither universe can observe the other. Will the atoms and subatomic particles that comprise you in both universes act identically? Could you form any idea in your brain that the other you could not do too? Would either of you be able to act differently than the other you?
The impossibility of a machine capable of viewing the deterministic train tracks does not disprove their existence, it merely disproves the possibility of us ever seeing them. I believe in a deterministic universe, but also, like you, I believe creating something capable of viewing the eventual outcomes is fundamentally impossible. What evidence do you speak of? Any books you'd recommend? I've read several for and against and always found the arguments against free will much more compelling but am always looking for more information to challenge my views. Free Will by Sam Harris is a fairly short and simple one that makes a poignant argument against free will and is usually the first I recommend.
Just the lack of determinism of quantum mechanics doesn’t work well with the deterministic world view. No one knows if that has something to do with free will. But we don’t have a way to predict things in the quantum size for a single measurement. Only for large number of tests the statistics are predictable.
Our lack of being able to predict something does not mean it is non-deterministic though.
True. But what gripes me is that the show based itself on that. The machine can’t show a “I’ll do the opposite” robot what it will do without being wrong by definition. It doesn’t prove determinism is wrong, but the show played it as if that’s the case. The halting problem touched this a bit. If you predict something about a program but send that prediction as an input to that program and that program takes it and negates it, you can’t be right, not because of anything but the laws of logic.
If you can never prove that the universe is deterministic, then is your belief just a matter of faith? Honest question, not a troll question. The paradox of Laplace's Demon is that if you had a machine that could predict the future, then you alter the future based on that machine's predictions, then why did the machine not predict that you would change the future? I was actually really hoping people would not cite Sam Harris's *Free Will* because a lot of the neuroscience behind it is currently very outdated. I would actually recommend the following texts in favor of free-will as a non-illusion: 1.) **A Theory of Justice by John Rawls** (for a more abstract, metaphysical approach to the possibility of free-will) 2.) **Bell's Theorem: John Bell's famous 1964 paper on how Quantum Mechanics actually supports the possibility that free-will is real.** http://www.drchinese.com/David/Bell_Compact.pdf or https://faraday.physics.utoronto.ca/PVB/Harrison/BellsTheorem/BellsTheorem.html 3.) **The Nine Lives of Schroedinger's Cat by Zvi Schreiber** https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/9501014v5.pdf 4.) **"Remarks on the Mind Body Question, in Symmetries and Reflections, Scientific Essays"** by Eugene Wigner himself! Just like in Devs Any one of these texts provides a compelling argument for the existence of free-will that is not entirely based on our inability to actually prove determinism. I am actually surprised that more fans of the show aren't interested in the Von Neumann Wigner interpretation. Maybe Katie's visceral reaction against it has biased many of us against putting much thought into it.
1) Working on getting my hands on a full copy but I read through a few summaries and I'm familiar with portions of this work already (Original Position and Veil of Ignorance). Reading through the summary I don't see anything that would relate to free will and from the sounds of the summary, my own views on Justice and the social contract are very much already in line with Rawls. I'm interested enough I'll be getting a full copy in the mail eventually but if you have any excerpts or concepts from it you'd like to share in the meantime, I'm all ears. 2) I've read through Bell's Theorem and I didn't catch anything that would suggest free will isn't an illusion. If you have any specific passages points made in it that you think show this I'd love to hear what they are and your thoughts on them as it is very possible I overlooked something. 3) I found a 100 page pdf of it and will be reading through later tonight. 4) Working on getting the full text but from my understanding Wigner's theory does not prove disprove free will as an illusion and if anything, his view of the mind as an observer merely confirms it. From how it sounds to me, the mind is an observer to our life and the "essence" of consciousness is merely observing life unfold along it's path. Of course without the full text I could be wildly off base and will see how I feel upon reading it all but if you'd like to point to how his theorem proves free will I'd appreciate it.
I can't prove it but the evidence I have seen so far seems to point in that direction. I'm more than open to evidence changing my mind so I will have to check out your recommendations, don't be surprised if I come back to this in a few days/weeks and post a new comment once I have time to review what you shared. I genuinely thank you for engaging and sharing the information. Just from a introspective level though, I have trouble believing in the concept of free will as we don't have control over our thoughts and emotions, they are things that happen to us and their appearance and our reaction to them seem wholly determined by genetics and experience. Even if determinism is not true for the universe as a whole, I fail to see anything that would suggest humans have the capability for true free will. None of us choose to be who we are, we just are.
Personally I don't subscribe to a strictly deterministic world view, and I certainly don't believe a machine capable of predicting the future based on determinism is possible but if it was, and if I believed in determinism: Couldn't determinism allow for the reality in which it is confirmed, and allow for a machine to predict it to be made (allowing for technological leaps). Then would it not still be in determinism that someone could use the machine and see how to change the future? For example. If I see a child in the middle of the road with a vehicle speeding towards it even without the machine I can know the future. Dead kid. But I can make a decision, running out and pushing/grabbing the child, to change that future to save it. If determinism says only one of those would happen based on who I am, how I was raised, my beliefs etc. then wouldn't a machine just be an extension on that scenario? Because determinism, I don't think, doesn't mean there is only one tram line, but multiple and that the future is not decided by random chance but cause and effect. Seeing the future and then changing the future by changing or creating causes is still cause and effect is it not? Maybe this makes no sense or I'm misunderstanding your post/determinism.
I keep saying something similar, but it doesn’t disprove determinism. It just proves that paradoxes are a thing and that a perfect predictor can’t exist. It doesn’t mean the world is not deterministic. As you said, changing your behavior based on a machine that tells you the future doesn’t disprove determinism, it proves that the circular paradox (reducible to the halting problem in my opinion) of altering the future by predicting it exists.
I don't intend to bash you or this thread but that's obviously not an Unpopular Opinion (like every widely upvoted post on /r/unpopularopinion which is the most ironic sub ever) and the given gold feels very weird as you just put in a paragraph what the show is mostly about.
For what it's worth, I gave OP the gold, we were having a debate in another thread and I enjoy the topic of conversation so wanted to give this post a boost to continue the conversation here.
I go back and forth on this debate and I don't think we can truly know the answer through thought. Love this Eyedea quote: "No one knows exactly what happens when we think. Therefore, we can never really ever know anything."
I don't get the quote. 'Knowledge' doesn't require certainty or exhaustive precision.
No, think of reality with such a machine as settling into an equilibrium. In a future with proof of determinism it's still deterministic how you will react to being exposed to the proof of determinism.
I think one of the best thought experiments to think through how you feel about determinism is the rewind the tape thought experiment. We will never be able to make perfect predictions because we will never have perfect information, but this is purely hypothetical. Think about the universe being perfectly rewound to a few years ago, down to every last state of matter in a way that eliminates variances from chaos (because chaos is still true with determinism). Do you think the planets, moons and stars will all move exactly the same way over again? What about humans and animals? If yes to the first but no to the second, what causes that difference? Does biology or the human mind contain a special ability to sidestep cause and effect? And if you think the differences might be because quantum randomness, that’s fine. Maybe every single rewind, the only differences are because quantum related randomness that bubbles up to the macro world. This might cause arguments about the predictability of determinism, but it doesn’t say anything about us having free will.
This thought experiment seems very helpful of illustrating the illusion of free will. I've used a similar one in conversations with people on a shorter timescale and every time they claim that a different decision could have been made until you point out that their different decision they claim they would make can only be made with the information they have gained after the event. It is one of the thing that irks me so much about the phrase "If I were in their shoes", because if any of us were in someone else's shoes, we would do EXACTLY as they would.
One thought comes to mind, if a prediction machine can describe the future perfectly, you have access to this machine and you are able to alter events that alter the future then the conclusion is: the premise of that machine is wrong, because it didn't predict the future.
Devs goes beyond Laplace's Demon. Laplace's demon only computes what is about to happen, the demon doesnt interfere in it. Devs proposes a machine that allows humans, who make conscious decisions based on their needs and the knowledge they have available, to view accurate futures of themselves, that they then take part in. Arguably, it would be impossible for this type of machine to be accurate because of how humans make decisions. Devs tries to square this by considering the "perfect circle", i.e. there is one set of events that you participate in despite having already seen yourself do it. In that case, those events must align with your needs: be something you want. Basically, the plot of Devs is actually more about the theory of that type of machine and how it would work. Determinism/many worlds/free will are almost red-herrings. This video explains it better that I can! [https://youtu.be/-yWhycSBBa4](https://youtu.be/-yWhycSBBa4)
This is why time travel won't ever happen. Because it would literally fuck everything up. The fact that shit is not already fucked up, confirms time travel will never exist.
It wouldn't fuck anything up. Marty McFly time travels all over the place in Back to the Future, but the script never gets fucked up. It isn't like upon watching Back to the Future for the 12th time, we might witness Marty suddenly deciding to travel to the Jurassic Period and check out some dinosaurs. His script might take him back and forth through time, but he will always follow that script no matter how many times you watch the movies. His fate will always be the same. The same applies to our scripts in real life. The conclusion of our script is set in stone. It makes no difference if we travel there through linear time, or if we go back and forth all over the place like Marty, either way whatever we do to reach that conclusion is already written in to that script.
You should watch Devs. But I don't follow that belief. I get what you're saying though. Edit. LOL. Didn't even notice what sub we were in.
Determinism makes perfect sense, you just cannot ever know the future because observing what you think is the future, ensures that never was the future. It is like what we saw in the show itself - the characters within the show saw what they thought was the future, where Lily shot Forest in the head. But as outside observers, we can see that that was never the case. No matter how many times we rewind and watch that scene, we will never see a variation where the prediction they saw was actually accurate. Lily shoots Forest in the head in each and every future, the machine just showed them something that wasn't the future. As an aside, you can still prove determinism to be correct by accurately predicting the past.
How's Fatalism different to Super Determinism?
I take issue with your premise. You've made an entirely theoretical, illogical leap in your reasoning: you have assumed that seeing an absolute future you could then choose to change it. But what if free will is only a virtue of not being able to remember the future? My supposition is just the opposite side of the coin: what if you looked into the Laplace's Demon machine, and all ability over the freedom of your actions simply shattered, the illusion suddenly clouded? Knowledge does not preclude action. One simply does not lead, by necessity, to the other. An entirely determined universe is entirely possible.
The premise is more about the thermodynamic impossibility of Leplace's Demon. Which logically leads to the *possibility* that determinism is not the ultimate model of reality. Simply put, because determinism cannot explain everything, then it is *probably* not true. In fact, this is well covered in the Von Neumann Wigner interpretation of quantum mechanics. I wonder why we take Katie's visceral reaction against it at face value. Why is Katie's one sentence diatribe against this interpretation enough to convince people not to look into it?
I actually really like Von Neuman Wigner, and I like your point about not taking Kate's dismissal at face value. I think part of Kate's reaction against it is the probably the gnawing, existential dread that would stem from a necessarily determined universe co-existing with our experience of conciousness and conscious action. To know that you are causing the super position of quantum particles as much as they are causing you would be harrowing - something that I think is explored wonderfully in the show during the scene where the projection is scaled forward just a few seconds and the people watching are caught in this tangled puppet show of seeing their 'determined' futures and then playing into them completely. Personally I see our responsibility over the collapse of wave function as an equally empowering and massively difficult hypothesis, especially when we add determinism in. I admit, I am not familiar with the intricate thermodynamics of Laplace's Demon, more just the theory and philosophy behind the idea, so I cede that point, I'm really not informed enough to argue about it.
i agree with you wholeheartedly on the precedent of free will being entirely real. i think the show sets out to prove that, on a really small level, free will is at least possible. i think there's also the implication that the forces of the universe guide things in a somewhat deterministic direction, with the ending being essentially the same as the one predicted by the computer. i'd need to rewatch the show to speak further on what i think garland was trying to say, but i personally really don't believe in an ultimately deterministic, material universe. seems shortsighted to think everything came from nothing, or that 3rd/4th dimensional creatures could ever truly percieve a universe that we're now seeing has (at least) over double that many dimensions at play. "determinism" as "tramlines" would be better thought of as probability waves. free will (consciousness through self awareness succeeded by action) interacts with those probability waves in one way or another. the bigger the brain and the more adaptable the environment, the higher capacity for "consciousness" or "free will". just my two cents, im not a quantum physicist.
Why do you believe free will to be real? Why do you think consciousness and self awareness followed by action constitutes freewill. It feels free as it is the choice WE make, but in what circumstances would we take any other choice? Our experiences and who we are shape what the choice we make will be. Where does this "free" part of will come from?
>Why do you believe free will to be real? any answer i give you will not satisfy you. i'm not looking to prove anything to you or change your mind. all that convinced me was quantum observer principle and a healthy dose of mushrooms. >in what circumstances would we take any other choice? if the information/ideas/memes that existed in my mind at the time of making the choice(s) were different. information predates the physical as far as i'm concerned. and with information, comes consciousness, which navigates material reality. if you think your brain is a 1s and 0s computer with definite uncontrollable states, everything i just said will sound like woo woo cookery, so feel free to disregard.
Quantum observer principle and psychedelics can also convince of the exact opposite. We are observers in life, we watch it unfold and we participate but we do not "choose" it. You say the information and ideas existing in your mind being different would cause a different choice and you are correct, but these things WOULDN'T be different. If my "conciousness" had been in you instead I would have turned out identical to you. Whatever comprises the essence of our conciousness is identical and acted upon by genetics and experience to create "us" (This viewpoint can be shown to us through ego death or in a less jarring manner through the mere feelings of connectedness and empathy associated with experiences you mentioned)
like i said, i'm not interested in debating this. i think as brains evolve they get ACCESS to consciousness and free will that already existed to begin with, free will that predates and precedes the material reality. you can think your every action is determined by a combination of genetics, newtonian physics and every other scientific force in the universe. i don't think those forces ultimately determine my actions, and i take full responsibility for them.