CoachAlan

Yes, they are distinguishable. It's the diffenece between Chaos and randomness. Chaos is the sensitive dependence on initial conditons you refer to. The roll of the dice is chaotic. Free will would indicate that, even if you knew all the associated initial conditions (which appears to be impossible), you couldn't predict outcome.
That is one hell of an argument, CSfilm. It's a side of this discussion I hadn't considered before. Free will, then, would be random AND determined behavior, a paradox. Can such a paradox really exist? I would contend no.

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zen_tom

What is random? Everything really ought to be deterministic (i.e. follow some kind of rules) it's just that we're unable to predict exactly what results the application of those rules is necessarily going to have at any one time. Hence the dice-roll is deterministic, as is the roulette wheel, the card-shuffle, the lottery-draw and the thoughts that are currently running through my head. None of them are easy (possible) to predict, but neither are any of them truely random. They all inhabit the realm of chaotic behaviour where both surprising order AND seeming chaos can co-exist and generate surprising emergent phenomenon.

asaris

One of my professors, Peter VanInwagen (for those interested in Free Will vs. Determinism, his book "An Essay on Free Will" is a must read) believes that both free will and determinism can be disproven with sound philosophical arguments -- I'm not sure I agree with him but I see why he says that. The problem of randomness is a very serious one for non-compatibilists. Why? Well, the whole notion of free will is that we are in control of our actions. If our actions are random, it's hard to see how we could be in control of them. Likewise, if our actions are pre-determined, it's hard to see how we could be in control of them. I just happen to think it's more difficult to see in the case of determinism.

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"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

CSflim

Quantum physics is apparently truely random, not merely "unpredictable".
Some physicists (e.g. David Bohm) have attempted to shoe-horn the theory into a deterministic framework using a system of mysterious "hidden variables", but few scientists accept this because it relies on things which we do not (and could not) have any evidence for.

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zen_tom

The 'we' that you refer to, the 'we' that either is, or isn't in control of our actions - (it is at least able to percieve and comment on the results of those actions) It gets us back to the question, What is it? What is it that we think of ourselves as being? This thing that looks out from behind a pair of eyes, often only ever dimly aware of itself.

What a truely strange thing, for matter to achieve a sense of identity!

zen_tom

A) What's the difference?
and
B) Why throw our hands up in the air, shrug and give up now? We'd might as well go back to believing it was all thrown together in 6 days, with God tweaking at the edges to keep us all in.

CoachAlan

It looks like I'm with you all the way on this one, zen_tom. Chaos, by James Gleick, really changed the way I looked at the world.

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zen_tom

Wow - I loved that book too, now that we know what we're talking about, there are some other really good books out there on similar themes:

I can really strongly suggest reading

The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World (Penguin Science) by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart

The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins

Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos by Roger Lewin

roachboy

i would suggest reading some stuff by francisco varela, a biologist who was also quite interested in philosophy, whose work runs across the boundaries that have been troubling people here.

the basic outline of this approach--biological autonomy i suppose one could call it---- is in a text he coauthored with his teacher muratana. it is called "the tree of life" and is a great place to start.

a later text, "the embodied self" addresses directly the questions raised above.

the same concerns animate his work on husserl's accounts of internal time consciousness, which seems to be a level of thinking where one can find a degree of recursion linking the processes that you would experience as staged via "subjectivity" (the nature and parameters of which are thoroughly ideological) and the patterns that shape that experience at what you might call the "hardware" level (the formation and activities of neural networks)---patterns which cannot be understood if you take the boundaries of the skull as determining the boundaries of interrogation.

the approach varela developed is fascinating, both in itself and in its philosophical implications. best to chase down some of his stuff for a potted summary than to rely on one attempted here.

for a jump-off:

http://web.ccr.jussieu.fr/varela/

varela died in 2000, but curiously enough his homepage still floats in netspace.
the husserl essay can be downloaded from the site.
it is technical, in that i assumes you have a working knowledge of husserl--but you might be able to work out the general direction of his work by having a look in any event.

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Ustwo

Of course its egotistical, but that doesn't mean its not true.

We could well be a 'special' case in biology, and its quite obvious we are very different from other species in many ways, and we share even more traits.

Perhaps we are just a naked ape, perhaps something 'better'. I am a evolutionary biologist by training, I can 'see' evolution, how it works, how things diverge, its very facinating. I have been an atheist most of my life, but sometimes when you see just how amazing life is, even when you see how A leads to B and changes to C, D, E, I have to wonder if there is something bigger, some guiding hand.

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asaris

And, just to point out, the belief that we are something more than just apes ("We are not thinking frogs", to quote F. Nietzsche) does not require the belief in anything so ephemeral as a soul. There are plenty of philosophical positions which are neither a brute physicalism (pain is just C-fibers firing) nor a naive dualism (body and soul are two different substances, easily seperable).

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"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."

"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

CSflim

A) Random is the opposite of deterministic.
Saying that something is "random" is a statement about that event. It's an ontological thing.
Saying something is "unpredictable" is really a statement about us and out knowledge of that thing. It is an epistemological thing.

A "random" number generator is actually not random. It is deterministic, but unpredictable.
Measuring the spin of a photon is actually random.

as for B, I honestly don't know what that is directed at. Care to explain?

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zen_tom

I'm not sure the jury is out on whether the spin of a photon is random, or just horribly unpredictable. It certainly is of a different order of unpredictableness in that it is impossible to predict what the spin will be before taking your measurement. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a deeper process that is currently inaccessible to us, as Bohm might have hoped. I don't know if this is the case, and I'm certainly not in a position to offer any theories as to what that deeper process might be. However, I'm not willing to accept (yet) that it is truely random.

I'd go as far as to wonder whether randomness is an abstract concept that may not actually exist in the physical world.

Re point B - Acceptance that there can be truely random occurances (without knowing why) seems counter to the scientific way of thinking. Progress over the centuries has been based on people asking questions and looking ever deeper into the forces of nature. Science always asks the question "Why is that so?" To stop doing so and accept that something "just is" is, in my eyes, akin to believing the words of the wise old Jews who first provided a 'reasonable' set of answers as written in Genesis.

Ultimately, they may be right, as may you, but I don't see any reason to suppose that the universe works this way. To paraphrase Mr Einstein, I find difficulty with the notion that "God Plays Dice".

zen_tom

Just a quick one on these 'hidden variables' - The fact that something is hidden, and may never be accessable to us in terms of evidence does not mean that it is not there. This may sound counter to the scientific method too, but it's not as disconcerting as the notion that true randomness may be at play only at the subatomic level, when everything else in the universe appears to be so nicely ordered.

Plato's Allegory of The Cave (http://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/cave.htm) though it was written to describe those who did not know his Theory of Forms, could (and I believe may) apply here.

CSflim

Well you are entitled to your beliefs Zen_tom. I was merely pointing out that they are contrary to current scientific thinking. (And the fact that they are unfalisifiable ensures that they will remain that way).

As for B, I simply have to disagree with you that randomness is counter to the scientific spirit. Don't confuse "random" with "arbitrary". There are distinct probabilites assinged to each event. Even when things are random, we can still make incredibly accurate predictions. The predictions made by Quantum mechanics are among the most useful and accurate in all of science.
Also, the fact that things appear non-random on the macro scale is due to statistics. (If you go to a casino, you can say with a good deal of confidence that at the end of the day, the house will win overall, even if you cannot say which way any particular game is going to go). hence the order on the large scale of the universe.

Further more, that some things have to be ultimately be accepted as brute fact is a sad fact of life. You can keep explaining things in terms of smaller simpler things, but ultimately in the end you have to say, well things are this way, just because. Say for instance science were to come up with a Grand Unified Theory of Everything, with, just say, strings as the ultimate "stuff of stuff". What then? How do you explain why this exists. An intractible mystery if ever there was one! (I am normally a vigourous defender of the potential of science, but I also know a brick wall when I see it).

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CSflim

Well, I've just realised how far off track this discussion has come from what was originally about the mind/body problem. Sorry about that.

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