New bird believes...

[doodab]

Hmm, but don't those "conscious calculations" get carried out by unconscious (and uncontrollable?) processes? If so, the conscious mind remains the unwitting servant of the unconscious with its instinctive and perhaps deterministic or random decision making processes? In any case I don't see any alternatives to decisions being made other than by deterministic or random means, what other choice is there, whether a decision is made consciously or not. What does it mean when people say they make a conscious decision or think they somehow escape deterministic or random choices. Is this a delusion? Perhaps that's what consciousness is, a grand delusion.

I think it's a mistake to conflate the idea of consciousness with the idea of free will. Clearly in a completely deterministic universe the machinations of a conscious mind are predetermined by the underlying physical processes and there is no free will, but that doesn't mean that the mind isn't aware of and reflective upon them, even if that awareness is itself predetermined.

Chaos theory provides another alternative. A fully deterministic system, where all variables are known and fully understood, but where outcomes can't be determined and appear essentially random. Emergent structures also appear, I think Turing was amongst the first to explorer this. You have to run the program, and the result may be drastically different each run. A unpredictable clockwork universe.

Chaos theory is about deterministic systems. It's not an alternative, rather a deeper understanding that goes beyond the naive assumption that predictability is an inevitable consequence of determinism. The idea that completely random systems can give rise to predictable behaviours seems closely related.

More pressingly, how can someone believe in both luck and fate? Surely they are mutually exclusive?

[EternalOptimist]

I think it's a mistake to conflate the idea of consciousness with the idea of free will. Clearly in a completely deterministic universe the machinations of a conscious mind are predetermined by the underlying physical processes and there is no free will, but that doesn't mean that the mind isn't aware of and reflective upon them, even if that awareness is itself predetermined.



Chaos theory is about deterministic systems. It's not an alternative, rather a deeper understanding that goes beyond the naive assumption that predictability is an inevitable consequence of determinism. The idea that completely random systems can give rise to predictable behaviours seems closely related.

More pressingly, how can someone believe in both luck and fate? Surely they are mutually exclusive?

Sometimes, when dealing with highly abstract ideas, it's useful to attack it from a non philosophical angle. just to have a look -see

imagine a highly competitive event, where one side believed in determinism and one side believed in free will. say a footy match.
one side comes out and says , it doesnt matter what we do, we will win 3-0 and they sit down and have a few beers
the other side comes out and says, it DOES matter what we do and they score a hundred goals

[EternalOptimist]

my first missus was a fool for believing in luck and psychic stuff

one year I told her that I was worried because Christmas was on a friday

she said, 'as long as it's not on the 13th, we should be ok'

[doodab]

Sometimes, when dealing with highly abstract ideas, it's useful to attack it from a non philosophical angle. just to have a look -see

imagine a highly competitive event, where one side believed in determinism and one side believed in free will. say a footy match.
one side comes out and says , it doesnt matter what we do, we will win 3-0 and they sit down and have a few beers
the other side comes out and says, it DOES matter what we do and they score a hundred goals

I don't think that a belief in determinism is quite the same thing as thinking that what you do doesn't matter. Obviously it does matter, because if it were to change the whole universe might fall apart.

[doodab]

my first missus was a fool for believing in luck and psychic stuff

one year I told her that I was worried because Christmas was on a friday

she said, 'as long as it's not on the 13th, we should be ok'

I owe you a rep.

[EternalOptimist]

I don't think that a belief in determinism is quite the same thing as thinking that what you do doesn't matter. Obviously it does matter, because if it were to change the whole universe might fall apart.

ah well , you believe that, and I believe that. Im not sure TW believes that

[doodab]

ah well , you believe that, and I believe that. Im not sure TW believes that

You have to keep plugging away even though it makes no difference in the end. A bit like shagging when you are really drunk.

[EternalOptimist]

You have to keep plugging away even though it makes no difference in the end. A bit like shagging when you are really drunk.

some people want to go to mars
some people want to get the secret of eternal youth
some people want to discover the higgs bozon
some people want to unravel the superstring theory


I want to learn the answer to, determinism or free will

it's always fascinated me

[EternalOptimist]

You have to keep plugging away even though it makes no difference in the end. A bit like shagging when you are really drunk.

and by the way


you cant plug away at an eternal verity. its either true or not
you cant persuade or convince


thats religion

[doodab]

you cant plug away at an eternal verity. its either true or not

Having studied the foundations of mathematics, I've concluded that this is another one of those things that seems like it ought to be true but might not be. One can take or leave the law of excluded middle or replace it with something similar that allows things to be undecidable, and still end up with a functional logical system. One could argue that quantum mechanics itself has a "law of included middle" allowing things to be both true and false simultaneously.

But disregarding that, what I was trying to say was that in a deterministic universe we can't just "give up because it doesn't make any difference" unless it's predetermined that we do so. We live and love because we must.