I've lost interest in her recently, many of her posts are no longer about physics and are too speculative, she's becoming just another "influencer", too much pop science.

This one, if I recall, was very weak, disappointing.

 

I've lost interest in her recently, many of her posts are no longer about physics and are too speculative, she's becoming just another "influencer", too much pop science.

This one, if I recall, was very weak, disappointing.

Kettle black.

 

I've lost interest in her recently, many of her posts are no longer about physics and are too speculative, she's becoming just another "influencer", too much pop science.

This one, if I recall, was very weak, disappointing.

Probably because she found out that more people are interested in wow-ism physics than in actual physics. More readers, more followers. It's the "I-have-more-followers-than-you" syndrome brought about by the social media boom.

But how could she say that there is no free will. If there was no free will then how did she create an article that claims that there is no free will

I think it is more apparent that we have free will and that to me also means that in order to prove that there was no free will we would have to know everything about the entire universe or even more, and possibly more about spiritual matters as well. If we really do not have free will then we are being fooled really well.
I don't think there is any experiment we can use to prove it one way or the other because it could always be that the experiment itself was included in part of the scheme that fooled us.

 

Probably because she found out that more people are interested in wow-ism physics than in actual physics. More readers, more followers. It's the "I-have-more-followers-than-you" syndrome brought about by the social media boom.

But how could she say that there is no free will. If there was no free will then how did she create an article that claims that there is no free will

I think it is more apparent that we have free will and that to me also means that in order to prove that there was no free will we would have to know everything about the entire universe or even more, and possibly more about spiritual matters as well. If we really do not have free will then we are being fooled really well.
I don't think there is any experiment we can use to prove it one way or the other because it could always be that the experiment itself was included in part of the scheme that fooled us.

She can't even define free will, so how can one refute a proposition that can't be stated. Too many scientists dabble in philosophy and try to treat it as they treat science and this is the mess that results.

 

Here's a proper discussion about free will:

In the 500th edition of the programme, Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the philosophical idea of free will.Free will - the extent to which we are free to choose our own actions - is one of the most absorbing philosophical problems, debated by almost every great thinker of the last two thousand years. In a universe apparently governed by physical laws, is it possible for individuals to be responsible for their own actions? Or are our lives simply proceeding along preordained paths? Determinism - the doctrine that every event is the inevitable consequence of what goes before - seems to suggest so.Many intellectuals have concluded that free will is logically impossible. The philosopher Baruch Spinoza regarded it as a delusion. Albert Einstein wrote: "Human beings, in their thinking, feeling and acting are not free agents but are as causally bound as the stars in their motion." But in the Enlightenment, philosophers including David Hume found ways in which free will and determinism could be reconciled. Recent scientific developments mean that this debate remains as lively today as it was in the ancient world. With: Simon Blackburn Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge Helen Beebee Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham Galen Strawson Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading, Producer: Thomas Morris.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00z5y9z

 

Probably because she found out that more people are interested in wow-ism physics than in actual physics. More readers, more followers. It's the "I-have-more-followers-than-you" syndrome brought about by the social media boom.

But how could she say that there is no free will. If there was no free will then how did she create an article that claims that there is no free will

She can't even define free will, so how can one refute a proposition that can't be stated. Too many scientists dabble in philosophy and try to treat it as they treat science and this is the mess that results.

Hi,

Yeah, I have to agree fully. They're not stupid so they understand the fallacy, but they seek more attention and think that's a good way to get it. It seems to mar their reputation, but they may not have much of a reputation to begin with so they grab at whatever they can no matter how off the wall it seems.
I think I watched the video a long time ago but can't remember if she states that as fact or just as a possibility. The good ones keep ideas like this as an open question and do not try to strongly assert one answer over another. The good ones won't say, "This is how it is like it or not", or similar.

 

Here's a proper discussion about free will:

In the 500th edition of the programme, Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the philosophical idea of free will.Free will - the extent to which we are free to choose our own actions - is one of the most absorbing philosophical problems, debated by almost every great thinker of the last two thousand years. In a universe apparently governed by physical laws, is it possible for individuals to be responsible for their own actions? Or are our lives simply proceeding along preordained paths? Determinism - the doctrine that every event is the inevitable consequence of what goes before - seems to suggest so.Many intellectuals have concluded that free will is logically impossible. The philosopher Baruch Spinoza regarded it as a delusion. Albert Einstein wrote: "Human beings, in their thinking, feeling and acting are not free agents but are as causally bound as the stars in their motion." But in the Enlightenment, philosophers including David Hume found ways in which free will and determinism could be reconciled. Recent scientific developments mean that this debate remains as lively today as it was in the ancient world. With: Simon Blackburn Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge Helen Beebee Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham Galen Strawson Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading, Producer: Thomas Morris.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00z5y9z

It's interesting that Einstein said that.
The only problem I see is that how do you predict that a person walking in front of a building under construction gets hit in the head with a falling wrench from far above. The wrench could have fallen as the result of a wind, a person's foot slip, a person holding a tool and looses their grip momentarily, etc. We'd have to believe that even the wind above that building has been predestined to blow in such a way as to dislodge that wrench, or that person suddenly develops Parkinsons, etc. That seems to suggest that every subatomic particle behaves in a very precise way and only in that way, and that very complex actions are happening only in the way they are destined to happen.
If that was true, then the degree of complexity would have to be limited I think. That would make the question turn into just how complex can interactions between matter become.
That also flies in the face of a somewhat new theory that there is such a thing as "functional evolution" where anything in the universe could be said to be working to create something that is more and more functional, and biological evolution is just a subcategory of that more all-encompassing theory. That's unless we were to believe that even that process has already been determined from the start of everything ever to be in existence.

I think the only way to prove something like that is to find a way to predict every single interaction that comes up in the future. We'd have to be able to sit down and write a program that could tell us that a person at 9:05am on say 05/25/2024 is going to walk in front of a building that is being constructed on such a street in such a town in such a state or other place in the world, gets hit by a falling wrench, and what is more, we would not be able to stop it by something like telling that person not to walk by that building that day at that time, because if we were to stop it then our program still isn't correct.

I think I can see what happens with some of the great thinkers though. They calculate so much stuff that it begins to look to them like anything could be calculated if needed, so they project that line of thought onto the future. It's interesting that NONE of them can do anything like that yet. We don't even have an accepted TOE yet.

 

She can't even define free will, so how can one refute a proposition that can't be stated

I suppose you can? I think she explains very well what she means by free will. Just because you don’t agree with her does not make her wrong.

IMHO, much of the problem is different understandings of what “I” and “self” mean.

 

I suppose you can? I think she explains very well what she means by free will. Just because you don’t agree with her does not make her wrong.

IMHO, much of the problem is different understandings of what “I” and “self” mean.

Hi,

Isn't free will just the ability to act autonomously instead of acting by following some sort of preprogrammed criterion?
That's what it seems to be to me anyway.
If that's not right, then that preprogramming algorithm has to be mighty complex and widespread. Unfathomably complex and unfathomably widespread.

 

I suppose you can? I think she explains very well what she means by free will. Just because you don’t agree with her does not make her wrong.

IMHO, much of the problem is different understandings of what “I” and “self” mean.

If I was going to record and post a video lecture on the subject then I would begin by defining it, one cannot meaningfully argue against an undefined proposition.

She starts out saying "of course we don't have free will". I can only take that to mean she believes the universe is deterministic other than for unpredictable quantum related events. That amounts to nothing more than her being a philosophical materialist, which is not a scientific position but a philosophical one.

Given all this, it is then very clear that her scientific arguments have no merit here.

She also states "Humans are one big collection of particles" but this is conjecture, assumption. One cannot prove that humans and their minds can be reduced to material only, again this is not a scientific claim, it is not falsifiable.

There is clearly something very and profoundly wrong with this kind of reasoning, to argue that humans, the universe are deterministic begs the question to what can we attribute the presence of determinism? how could determinism just come to exist? The fact that determinism does exits suggest to me that something else must be at play, something other than determinism must have caused determinism to exist - perhaps that was some agency's "free will".

 

Isn't free will just the ability to act autonomously instead of acting by following some sort of preprogrammed criterion?

The ability of what to acting autonomously? My brain is certainly acting autonomously (as long as I keep my tinfoil hat on). And it is not following any “program”.

Most people, when they say they have free will, mean there is some mystical self that is distinct from than the interactions of billions of neurons with trillions of connections.

Tell m what you think “I” means in the statement “I have free will.”

 

The ability of what to acting autonomously? My brain is certainly acting autonomously (as long as I keep my tinfoil hat on). And it is not following any “program”.

Most people, when they say they have free will, mean there is some mystical self that is distinct from than the interactions of billions of neurons with trillions of connections.

Tell m what you think “I” means in the statement “I have free will.”

Hi,

Thanks for the reply, however I am not sure where you are with this.

Didn't I say that a person would be acting autonomously which differs from a program in a computer like we normally see (I do not want to get into 'ai' presently).
Maybe I should state it a different way...
A person walks to a table and sees a cup of coffee and a cup of tea. They make a decision to pick up the coffee. That's autonomous whereas if a program was written to do that it would only have at it's disposal at best a randomizing function that forces it to pick up one or the other. It is not choosing, it is just following the instructions.
It's true though that the persons decision to pick up the coffee might have been brought about by the fact that it was early morning and that was part of their routine, but if they found they were running late, they could avoid both cups and rush out the door. Now we could program the computer to consider the time frame too, but that's still just a programmed response.

To me that means that free will is the ability to choose in a large number of ways whereas a program will always be limited and will always be a very mechanical action.
I can understand however how it can be thought of as a human being programmed too because they are set up with different cases where there is a good chance that something predictable could happen just like with the program, but I think the human works on a much deeper level than a computer program.

Another case might be an inventory program vs a human manual count and log. The inventory program will always be limited even though it can be very good. The human can easily react to a change in the priority of certain items or the color or the significance of the current count, etc.

It's true that we could create more complex programs that 'mimic' human behavior, but it's always going to be limited I think. Even 'ai' is limited in many ways.

The bottom line is maybe it does not matter if we have free will or not, because we won't change much if we believe one or the other. Maybe it is free will sometimes and not free will other times in other situations. I'm pretty sure if someone parachutes from 5000 feet they know they must pull the cord at some point, and the program would know that too, but that's pretty much a forced response. What if at the last moment the human decides it's not worth living anymore so never pulls the cord, can the program do that too, or more realistically would anyone want to program a computer to destroy itself because the program felt that life was not worth living anymore, or that it was not worth operating itself anymore. Maybe the other computer programs it talked to previously were putting it down a lot because it was not as good as they were

Of course this is all based in the present time where we have limited programming even if it's 'ai'. Who knows what may come in the future.

The real bottom line is that we do not know everything about the brain yet so we do not know if it can be duplicated perfectly yet.

 

Didn't I say that a person would be acting autonomously which differs from a program in a computer like we normally see (I do not want to get into 'ai' presently).

I don’t claim that what the brain does is the same as a “ program that we ordinarily see”.

If that difference is your definition of free will, that is a very weak definition of free will that practically everyone would accept. But I don’t think this is anything close to what others mean by the term.

 

Philosophers have gone deeper into this, a strictly "scientific" analysis by definition can only entertain mechanistic, deterministic models for anything including human minds.

The suggestion that there are explanations that are not scientific is a huge struggle for some people, and no surprises since we live in a world that worships "scientism".

This pain can be reduced however if one realizes, admits, that scientific explanations are not actually explanations but rather alternative ways of describing things. Newton never explained gravitation nor did Einstein, they just described it in new ways.

 

I don’t claim that what the brain does is the same as a “ program that we ordinarily see”.

If that difference is your definition of free will, that is a very weak definition of free will that practically everyone would accept. But I don’t think this is anything close to what others mean by the term.

Well I would be happy to read what your definition is or what you think a stronger definition is.

Maybe what you are getting at is that when humans make a choice it has to be based on something at least somewhat logical. After all it is a choice, and a logic circuit kind of does that too except it's very rudimentary. That would make us just a more complex version of a machine like a computer with a program.

 

Philosophers have gone deeper into this, a strictly "scientific" analysis by definition can only entertain mechanistic, deterministic models for anything including human minds.

The suggestion that there are explanations that are not scientific is a huge struggle for some people, and no surprises since we live in a world that worships "scientism".

This pain can be reduced however if one realizes, admits, that scientific explanations are not actually explanations but rather alternative ways of describing things. Newton never explained gravitation nor did Einstein, they just described it in new ways.

Hi,

Yes that's a good way to put it too. We are just mimicking what we see happening around us just like what a baby does when it first starts to learn about the surroundings.

 

 

Well I would be happy to read what your definition is or what you think a stronger definition is.

Maybe what you are getting at is that when humans make a choice it has to be based on something at least somewhat logical. After all it is a choice, and a logic circuit kind of does that too except it's very rudimentary. That would make us just a more complex version of a machine like a computer with a program.

Now you are getting there.

My stronger definition of free will would be that @something@ is making decisions that cannot be explained by a sufficiently detailed description of the physical elements of the brain and their interactions based on the rules of physics. It seems obvious to me that that @something@ must then be non-physical and @somehow@ interacts with our physical bodies. And I reject this because there is no evidence of such interaction seen in hundreds of years of precise physical measurements.

Again I ask, if you say “I have a free will”, what does I mean? If you think about it, it is far from obvious.

 

Now you are getting there.

My stronger definition of free will would be that @something@ is making decisions that cannot be explained by a sufficiently detailed description of the physical elements of the brain and their interactions based on the rules of physics. It seems obvious to me that that @something@ must then be non-physical and @somehow@ interacts with our physical bodies. And I reject this because there is no evidence of such interaction seen in hundreds of years of precise physical measurements.

Again I ask, if you say “I have a free will”, what does I mean? If you think about it, it is far from obvious.

Hello again,

Well to me it seems obvious that if you have free will then you have the ability to make decisions based on only what you decide without any outside influence. I do not think this is the same as cause and effect either now that I think about it. In other words, if someone is subject to an external stimulus they may react in any way they choose. They may follow the normal path or a very abnormal path. If they could only follow the normal path, that would not be free will.
Now it is tempting to add randomness to this idea. What if the 'person' was simply flipping a coin, then that coin would be deciding, and we could even say that since they were aware of this experiment that they had an 'extra' stimulus and that is why they did that, which is again cause and effect. However, it could just be the choice of the person doing the experiment without any other input. They do not have to flip a coin, they could just decide to do something one way or the other.
The key is why would they decide one way or the other. Moreover, if two people were involved, maybe one would choose one way and the other person choses the other way.
Could it be based on their history of the way they lived in the past? That would make it seem more mechanical again, but I do not think it is that simple. Another way of stating it would be that the choices are not quite as simple as a confluence of events. It's more like an emergence, which is very hard to resolve using pure logic, which would be pure mechanics.

So the bottom line to the question I would think is 'confluence of events' versus 'emergence'. Does a person believe that every decision is due to a long line of events that led up to the decision, or a more complex structure like emergence where it's very hard to determine how things came together to form this decision.
Now it becomes a question of can emergence be thought of as being synonymous with a long chain of HIGHLY logical events where one leads to the other or a lot of those logical events come together at the very moment the decision is just about to be made. This would be hard to prove because some things are not known yet and are more or less attributed as arising out of emergence.

Does this make sense to you or do you still have some reserves?

Another word that comes to mind is "Emergentism".

 

Hello again,

Well to me it seems obvious that if you have free will then you have the ability to make decisions based on only what you decide without any outside influence. I do not think this is the same as cause and effect either now that I think about it. In other words, if someone is subject to an external stimulus they may react in any way they choose. They may follow the normal path or a very abnormal path. If they could only follow the normal path, that would not be free will.
Now it is tempting to add randomness to this idea. What if the 'person' was simply flipping a coin, then that coin would be deciding, and we could even say that since they were aware of this experiment that they had an 'extra' stimulus and that is why they did that, which is again cause and effect. However, it could just be the choice of the person doing the experiment without any other input. They do not have to flip a coin, they could just decide to do something one way or the other.
The key is why would they decide one way or the other. Moreover, if two people were involved, maybe one would choose one way and the other person choses the other way.
Could it be based on their history of the way they lived in the past? That would make it seem more mechanical again, but I do not think it is that simple. Another way of stating it would be that the choices are not quite as simple as a confluence of events. It's more like an emergence, which is very hard to resolve using pure logic, which would be pure mechanics.

So the bottom line to the question I would think is 'confluence of events' versus 'emergence'. Does a person believe that every decision is due to a long line of events that led up to the decision, or a more complex structure like emergence where it's very hard to determine how things came together to form this decision.
Now it becomes a question of can emergence be thought of as being synonymous with a long chain of HIGHLY logical events where one leads to the other or a lot of those logical events come together at the very moment the decision is just about to be made. This would be hard to prove because some things are not known yet and are more or less attributed as arising out of emergence.

Does this make sense to you or do you still have some reserves?

Another word that comes to mind is "Emergentism".

I agree with Bob, the definition is elusive at best, and that's why I dismissed her lecture on it. I'd listen and take notes when she speaks physics, but philosophy is not her thing.