You lose me here.
No, predictability in principle just means determinism i.e. the inevitability of either coffee or tea (given physics and some prior global state).
The Void | Two-Phase Cosmology
How can something come from nothing? The answer is simple, and has been known since antiquity: Ex nihilo nihil fit – from nothing, nothing comes. If absolute nothingness had ever been real, there would still be nothing now. The existence of anything at all means that, barring a logic-defying miracle, some kind of eternal ground must underlie reality. That leaves us with two options. One is an eternally complex source such as an Abrahamic God – a pre-existent being who chooses a possible cosmos and wills it into being. The other is an eternally simple source – a condition with no prior structure, no determinate content, but infinite potential. The simplest possible paradox: an Infinite Void.
I have never believed in the intelligent designer God which so many Western theists are convinced is real. By the time I was old enough to have formed a view on such things, I had decided it was about as believable as Father Christmas, and I chose Christmas Day to refuse to attend church ever again. Much has changed about my understanding since then, but the idea of God as a kind of CEO and project engineer of reality has never made sense to me. If such a being actually does exist – a God who thinks, designed the cosmos, and makes strategic decisions about the course of human history – then I have a lot of questions to ask about the details of Its decision-making. So for me this is not a tough decision – the Two-Phase Cosmology begins with an Infinite Nothingness. I write this as 0|∞. This represents the unity of absolute absence and limitless possibility – the paradoxical ground from which all structure arises.
Are there any other alternatives? Anything I missed which exists in this logical space?
Which do you believe, and why?
I just prefer philosophy that starts from a comprehensible ground, even if it leads to paradox.
And what comprehensible ground do you suggest? What options are there apart from a complex God, an infinite Void, and absolute nothingness?
I think I’m fine with the third? Seems comprehensible to me. Not everyone. So there’s that.
Disagree.
Determinism means that the future state of the universe is a derived conference from the current state.
In itself it doesn’t entail predictability (and indeed perfectly calculating future states is effectively impossible for non trivial sizes and timescales due to chaotic systems).
A third party using the deterministic nature of the system to make a prediction has to simulate the system; in the case of a human making choices that includes the conscious thoughts, changes of mind, highest desires, impulses etc of the person in question.
Of course we could say that perhaps the third party performs a prediction in some other way? Well sure, but in that case we could say the same about any system. If we’re going to invent magic means of prediction why is this only a possibility in a deterministic universe?
You think it is comprehensible that we started with nothing - not even the possibility of anything existing - and then a cosmos appeared, with no explanation, and no mechanism even possible (because nothing existed before)? And this cosmos just happens, against insurmountable odds, to be just right for conscious life to evolve?
This requires illogical magic. If the original state had been absolute nothingness, and reality is consistent with logic, then that is what would still exist.
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With no prior structure or determinate content, why does it not remail potential? A boulder on top of a mountain had the potential to roll down, and flatten the house below. But the boulder will never roll down if nothing changes. Why is there a change to the absence of structure and determinate content of the infinite void?
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Oh. Ok. But, on the other hand,
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The Void itself is the ground of being. It contains within it all non-conscious possibilities – this is a strong form of mathematical Pythagoreanism. The whole of mathematics exists eternally within it, as do all possible timelines in all possible cosmoses apart from those which encode conscious beings. This is equivalent to Max Tegmark’s “mathematical multiverse” combined with Everett’s MWI, except both those systems claim all possibilities are also actualities. 2PC says they exist only as possibilities. This is what I call “primordial Phase 1”.
So the next question is why Phase 2 ever emerges from Phase 1. As I have defined it so far, Phase 1 stops only where there is a specific timeline in a specific cosmos which encodes an entire evolutionary path from a big bang to the first organism with a brain (which crosses what I call the Embodiment Threshold). Each of these end points (in the information structure) I call a “cosmic egg”, because they are a cosmos-in-waiting. But there are an infinite number of these – there are infinite possible timelines leading to the first conscious brain even in our own cosmos, and presumably there are other configuration of physical laws which lead to other first conscious brains.
Why can’t the structure continue in phase 1? Because a (realised) brain is capable of making a decision about which continuation it prefers, so unitary evolution cannot continue – it must stop splitting. (See the Embodiment Inconsistency Theorem at the end of link above.)
This leaves what is probably the most important unanswered question in 2PC, which is what decides which cosmic egg is the next in line to “hatch”. How does the Void “decide” which possible cosmos to realise? This has to be determined somehow, because otherwise there’s nothing to stop all of them hatching together, or even being actualised repeatedly – maximal ontological bloat (and functionally indistinguishable from Tegmark). A brain cannot decide this, because it is a decision about which possible brain becomes real. The best explanation is that the shortest timeline, or the one requiring the minimum information, is selected. This would provide an explanation for why we keep finding objects in the very distant cosmos which are far too big or mature, far too early. It suggests we aren’t just in a cosmos fine-tuned for life, but in a cosmos and timeline where conscious life evolved as quickly or efficiently as possible.
I am aware this is exactly the sort of gap that theists would like to insert God into, but as things stand it is an open question.
I find it comprehensible though hazardous from here, “in” the universe, to talk about an “outside” or “before” the universe. (With scare quotes.) Just as a kind of logical but already paradoxical implication of reasonable conjectures about the universe, like it being bounded, or some such mathematical property. But those reasonable conjectures depend on less cosmic and more mundane physics, no? We can’t do it top-down?
That tends to be my assumption, anyway.
I’m intrigued by your version, though, because I agree with a lot of your points about free will.
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They’re all metaphysical, surely.
All I am doing is saying that both physicalists and theologians assume that we must start from nothing, and from there a cosmos must be constructed (either under guidance of natural law, or by a creator God), and that this assumption is the most fundamental mistake in the history of Western thinking (starting with Plato and Aristotle – Anaximander and Pythagoras had already proposed something exactly like this before then). In Eastern philosophy, there has always been an alternative – start with infinite possibility and the explain how the particular reality we observe is selected. This is more similar to starting with a solid block of marble, and selectively removing things to reveal a sculpture. These are two completely different modes of creation, and quantum physics is basically asking for the latter interpretation. QM is literally a physics of possibility, while classical-relativistic physics is the physics of perspectival actuality. I’m saying both are real, but distinct. Physicalists are forced to try to fit them together into a continuous model, but they’ve spent 100 years trying to finding the quantum theory of gravity required to make this work, and have failed.
2PC says consciousness/will “carves” classical reality from the quantum block.
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The two different contexts of those statements was the practical versus theoretical, so let’s clarify:
Determinism does not entail that the future state of a system is predictable – chaotic systems for example mean it is impossible to make measurements of the required number and precision to predict that system’s state at any arbitrary future time T.
However, it would be true to say that speaking purely in principle, from a God’s-eye-view, then yes there’s a way to make a prediction and it’s the one I said: by perfectly simulating the universe including your conscious thoughts.
OTOH the notion of non-computable phenomena is posed because, ISTM, the assumption is that they are non-predictable. But we don’t know that. A computer is a specific kind of machine with a fixed set of processes. Saying non-computable does not entail non-predictable nor even non-deterministic.
Now that I’ve clarified on that, do you want to answer the questions I was putting to you?
But that just begs the question. The argument only works if you assume the conclusion is true. You’re assuming that it is possible to perfectly simulate consciousness by perfectly simulating a brain, but we have no way of establishing whether or not this is actually the case, and plenty of respectable people reject it.
OTOH the notion of non-computable phenomena is posed because, ISTM, the assumption is that they are non-predictable. But we don’t know that.
Add it to the long list of things we don’t scientifically know about consciousness…
No I am simply laying out what follows from the definitions.
A deterministic universe, by definition, is wholly determined from a prior state. So even if it’s not practical for humans to predict the future state from the current state, from a god’s eye view (i.e. with complete knowledge of the current universe’s state) it is necessarily possible.
Well we don’t know whether it’s computable or not in the first place. But I think you missed my point – I’m saying that the whole reason that non-computability is even appealing to some people doesn’t necessarily follow. It’s just based on an irrational (in my view) fear of actions being predictable, which non-computability doesn’t necessarily address.
And in a universe where free will is possible, by definition, this is not the case.
We learn nothing by feeding a conclusion into the start of an argument.
It’s just based on an irrational (in my view) fear of actions being predictable,
And this whole thread is a refutation of both claims – it is not irrational, and I do not fear determinism (I just think it is false). Attributing it to fear is effectively psycho-analysing me, and you are not in a position to do that.
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Obviously the point of my interjection:
was to highlight precisely that choice. You seem more keen than me to keep the “in practice” alternative in play, with bizarre cosmic scenarios. My suggestion was to keep to determinism:
You seem to think people need it explaining to them that determinism implies predictability in principle. It’s so tedious.
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Why would they be important or even relevant for free will?
What I find relevant for a freely willed action is whether the action is intended (intentional). If an action is unintended then it is not freely willed (for example, slipping on a banana peel). If an action is intended, then it is determined by the intention to perform the action but we must ask how the intention to perform the action was created. If this intention itself is not freely willed, then the action determined by it is not freely willed either, because the action is ultimately determined by something that is not freely willed. On the other hand, if this intention is freely willed, then its creation must be determined by another intention - an intention to create the intention to perform the action. So we get an infinite regress of intentions in order to perform a single action but we are not aware of such an infinite regress, which means that it either doesn’t exist or it is unconscious and therefore unintended. In conclusion, neither an unintended action nor an intended action can be freely willed.
Because if an indivisible informational self-model (in a superposed brain) can be aware of different possible futures, and assign non-computable value to them, then we would have a situation where it is logically impossible for unitary evolution of the wavefunction to continue. At the exact point MWI suggests our minds split, the wavefunction must collapse, and the existence of these valuations would provide a basis for branch selection. The valuations have to be non-computable or they could be encoded in the wavefunction, and MWI-style mind-splitting would remain logically possible.
And my answer is that it is created when consciousness assigns non-computable valuations to different possible outcomes in any given situation.
Why? At this point you are assuming your conclusion. Non-computable valuations cannot be determined by anything else - that is the whole point.
Exactly the point I was about to make.