Posted: Oct 12, 2017 9:53 pm
Cito di Pense wrote:John Platko wrote:It's not about what I want to believe it's about what experts in the field find credible to believe and are working hard to learn more about. And metaphysical explanations (and you are in the philosophy section of the forum) cut their teeth on consistent systems of thought that exclude what is known to be impossible. It is useful, in and out of the laboratory to know the difference between what is possible and what is impossible and what is only imagined to be so.
Still, it has never been clear why you think ANY of this work is relevant to the (philosophical) problem of free will, other than that you're heard a couple of physicists jokingly or speculatively say some... stuff. My take is that you are free associating with what you think you heard. Again.
ANY?
It should be obvious why List's paper was about Free Will, the Title was a clue:
Free will, determinism, and the possibility of doing otherwise
And List's paper introduced the philosophy of branching histories and showed how coarse grained agential states are multiply realizable. And he gave some nice definitions of determinism and indeterminism.
Sometimes we wish to refer not to an entire world history, but only to a truncated part of that history, up to a given point in time t. To do so, we introduce the notation ht to denote the restriction of the history h to the set of all points in time up to t.29 With these concepts in place, we can give formal definitions of determinism and indeterminism. Determinism is the thesis that:
Determinism: For any two histories h, h’ in Ω and any point in time t in T, if ht = h’t, then h = h’.
That is, any two histories that coincide up to time t are identical in their entirety; so the world history up to any point in time t fully determines its continuation. Indeterminism is the negation of this thesis.
Indeterminism: There exist some histories h, h’ in Ω and some point in time t in T such that ht = h’t but h ≠ h’. That is, there can be two or more distinct world histories that coincide up to some point in time t but subsequently branch out in different directions.
In addition List provide nice formalism for agential states, multiple realizable agential states, and history branch points.
However, as GrahamH likes to point out, List developed his theory using deterministic histories not indeterministic histories.
And, there was a feeling of: how does all this branching history stuff connect to reality and real physics?
So I introduced Sean Carroll's MWI descriptions to:
1) Introduce histories that coincided up to a point and then branch - which List defines an indeterministic histories.
2) Show that this isn't just about guys sitting around smoking and imagining shit.
3) GIve some idea of how the branching could work (this is metaphysics, could is on the table as long as the system of thought is consistent and nothing can be shown to be impossible (the more possible, the better the argument) about the system of thought)
The fly paper title also gave clue as to why I brought it up:
Towards a scientific concept of free will as a biological trait: spontaneous actions and decision-making in invertebrates
The best part of the fly paper is how it tied William James 2 stage free will to flies and therefore biology.
And the retrocausality was a probably hopeless attempt to encourage romansh to stop taking physics as gospel. Physics is just another way of explaining stuff.
So
it's not free association, it's an orderly path towards understanding more about free will.John Platko wrote:So Sussking is a woo artist too?Even I'm embarrassed for you.
Did I say I think Susskind is a woo artist? If you can't point to where I said it, I think you should probably just belay that nonsense. The woo artists are the lay people who are gobbling up sound bites looking for a few bars of verbal jazz they can feel supports their woo. When I think you've make an argument that's relevant to the topic of this thread, I'll let you know.
Ditto.
I'll let the readers of your many comments about the many world class scientists whose work I presented in this thread and others judge if you were disparaging them or not.
John Platko wrote:If you going to take pot shots at the likes of: David Deutsch, Sean Carroll, Christian List, Leonard Susskind, Andrew Friedman then your powder may be found to be all wet when you aim at more deserving targets....
Did I say I had a problem with their motivations? If you can't point to such a statement, I suggest you just stuff your nonsense back into the intellectual cloaca it just splashed out of. The worst thing I can say about what Susskind has to say was that it's glib. I don't know why most of that stuff gets posted on youtube. Do you have any information about the channel you found it on? Or is it unvetted, like almost everything else that gets posted on youtube.
Well we had this exchange:
Cito di Pense wrote:John Platko wrote:
But I see your point, physicists seem to have a bit of carnival barker in them.
Some of them, anyway. The ones you like listening to -- they know what you want to hear, and that's why we hear from you only about them (see last lines of this post for more). This is big business for them, entertaining with woo. They get funding for that because of all the woo-heads out there who want to hear all about that shit.
So yes, I would say you globally disparaged every scientist whose work I posted.
As for the Susskind video, it looks to me like it was part of one of his Stanford Class for over the hill people. He does a lot of those- but I'm not sure. He is very serious in all the videos I watched.