So.
I don't believe there is anything that is random. The throw of the dice may seem random (what are the odds of coming up 12? 1:36) but is it really? For example, if we knew the exact velocity, angle, momentum, if we knew every atom and its place of the dice pit, and the static and kinetic coefficient of friction at each and every point, well, eventually if we knew all of this and plugged it in to a formula, we could get an answer, right?
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle states we can't know where an electron is at the same time as knowing its velocity (or something like that). So perhaps humans may be excluded from this knowledge, but what about a perfect being? What if there were a god who knew everything... would he be excluded from this knowledge, somehow? And if this god did only use his ability to know everything in the past and everything in the present, but not the future, would he be able to predict which Carbon atom will radioactively decay "at random"? I have to imagine there is some fine subtlety to this random decay that an all-knowing deity could figure out.
Obviously my position is completely reliant upon cause and effect. But if you don't want to believe in cause and effect go jump off a bridge and inherit a million bucks for all I care.
I mean, is this agreeable? That if we had 100% knowledge of everything at any given point in time, as well as everything that has happened before that point (and I mean the whole sum of experiences, including the positioning of the molecules in the air and their charge and how they interact with everything else, and all human experience and subconscious thought, etc...) we would be able to predict, with 100% accuracy, what the next step in anything would be? The next ray of sunlight would land... the throw of the dice would be... the sand particle would blow here... the wolf would howl now... and so on and so forth, and so if every "next" action is known, that provides the basis upon which every next next action would be. Again, we're making two assumptions: one, that cause and effect has merit and two, that there is some formula for everything, whether or not human beings could ever possibly understand it. But these don't seem like big jumps to me.
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So.
I'm going to make another assumption in a moment. If the day was reset, and everything went back to where it was, the earth's positioning, the chemicals, the molecules, the spins, the sand, the water, and our minds, and then the day went on again, everything would play out the same way, as though we were rewinding a movie and playing it forward again. However, I'm going to argue that in addition to the sand blowing in the exact same spot, people will have the exact same choices and decisions and thoughts as they did before the day was reset. Though we have infinite choices, we will always choose the same answer, if nothing has changed, because the day was reset. And so, if we always choose the same answer, I wonder if after infinite resettings of this universe, it is fair to even call it a choice? Isn't it just predetermined? Is it truly a matter of choice if there is no random deviation?
Furthermore, if we are all products of this grand and complicated formula, which has shown 100% predictable results from the very initial pulse of the Universe coming to existence, then isn't it kind of unfair? That is to say, if your parameters involve some negative signs, and another person's parameters involve none, isn't it automatically more likely you will be a negative? And so, if a person is thrown into these vicious formulas, he's merely a product of them, and not vice versa... so does he get damned and thrown into hell? If Hitler had been born to another family and didn't have the exact same environmental influences on him, wouldn't he have very likely been a different person? And is it fair to his everlasting soul that he, who fell into the wrong part of the equation, should receive hell when someone who serendipitiously fell into a positive part of the equation does not? Why couldn't he have fallen into that better part? And so on and so forth.
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Oh yeah. What I'm asking for is either evidence that I'm wrong, or an explanation that tells me something about what would happen to HItler, if there were an afterlife. That would be the help I'm seeking to this dilemma.
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I fully intend to reply to this topic! I just need to focus right now on this stupid MATLAB program from Hell.
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"If I pick nine, you'd better not be racist against me!"
"No promises, niney."
The concept of Hell depends on the concept of choice (or else it's unfair) and as you said, choice is precluded. You say "more likely" that somebody will be a negative, but according to your hypothesis, it's not a likelihood, it's a certainty.
I think also in your hypothesis (and I see nothing wrong with it) we'd only have to know all the information at any given point in time. From there if we were smart enough we could divine the immediately previous action and the one immediately previous to that, ad infinitum, and likewise the next immediate action, etc.
So going back to the choice thing, the only way I can see a Heaven/Hell concept being fair is if there is choice and the only way there can be choice in a universe of formulas is if there's something non-formulaic. But it can't be random, as you suggested, because a random result isn't a choice either. So to make any sense of any of it, I propose that the universe either is deterministic or there are souls, which are the free agents of the universe, who can accomplish desired results in predictable ways through non-determined (free) choice and action.
I was discussing something like this with a guy just last night...
I think you're asking something from the idea of "choice" that it just can't deliver. Just because your thoughts and decisions aren't determined causally doesn't mean that they're not choices and that you don't have free will. If you say that you've got no responsibility for your actions just because you're trapped in a perfectly causal system then you're embracing an unprofitable illusion: You're not trapped in the system, you're part of the system. This illusion is -- and this is a bit difficult to put into words so I hope I get it across -- that you can look at the system from some outside perspective, break it apart, and individually examine certain components separately from the rest of the system despite the fact that those components are inextricably intertwined with*, by virtue of being identical with, the parts of the system you left behind.
(*'Identical' not in the way that two pens made in the same factory are identical, but that Mark Twain is identical to Samuel Clemens)
For example, it is absurd to say, "If Hitler had been born to another family then so-and-so." If a person is born to a family other than the Hitlers, then they cannot be Hitler. And if a person is not born at the same time and have the same life experiences as that of the Adolf Hitler we all know, then they are not the Adolf Hitler we all know. Hitler is not governed by the combination of his physical premises, experiences, behaviors, and so forth; he is Twain-identical to them.
It helps if you consider the Universe, as many do in physics (as Heisenberg does. By the way, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is that the more you know about a particle's position at a given time the less you know about its velocity at a given time; if you knew either one with 100% accuracy then you would not know the other one at all, which would therefore probably be a useless state of affairs for you because without at least some accuracy in both columns, you can't make any prediction about where that particle might be at any other time. Woo, long tangent. I think I'll just start the paragraph over).
It helps if you consider the Universe in terms of information. A particle's complete state and potential behavior is Twain-identical to the particle itself. If you fed all the numbers that describe every particle to a simulator that is big and powerful enough (or has enough time) to do all the necessary computation (e.g. in www.xkcd.com/505/) then the simulation it would run would not only be a perfect copy of the universe but Twain-identical to the Universe itself. In essence, you're regarding the Universe as being a pattern rather than an instance (which is just an alternative perspective).
In light of that view, the resetting day scenario you describe becomes a little less interesting: Instead of one day that keeps happening over and over again, you have one day that just happens, and the idea that it happens X times is meaningless to consider. Considering the possibility that it might happen differently is as absurd as considering the possibility that the plaid pattern on my shirt might become different if you extend the shirt long enough (this is a weird metaphor; I hope I'm getting the ideas I'm trying to get across across).
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If you take the information-based view, something strange happens when you try to consider a being with perfect knowledge: Their perfect knowledge of the Universe is an instance of the Universe itself(!). Of course, we don't personally know anyone with perfect knowledge of the Universe. In fact, any mechanism for determining deterministically what will happen to the Universe is the Twain-same thing as the Universe itself. And since time, as we know and perceive it, flows only in one direction***, we can't -- and no being can -- be aware of the events of the future with absolute certainty. Therefore, the idea of actual predetermination is absurd. The only mechanism for determining absolutely what will happen in the Universe is the Universe itself.
(*** That is, events cannot be affected by events that happen later in time.)
What does this mean for Hitler? It means what you make of it, I suppose, but to me it means that he can't point back at his family, his genes, and his influences, and say, "It's not my fault." Free will may be an illusion, but at the Twain-same time it's a reality, in that you are the part of the universe that directly brings about your own behavior.
Now, responsibility is an even bigger illusion than Free Will and we can't necessarily say that Hitler's actions are more responsible for the Holocaust than the political mood that got him elected, or the fervor of the rest of the Nazi Party, or the soldiers who fired the bullets. But I think we can certainly hold Hitler accountable for his own behavior.
About the afterlife I don't presume to know. I rarely consider the idea very deeply; if there is an afterlife, I don't know how it works and who, if anyone, makes the rules. I can tell you that chances are that Hitler is somewhere in the lowest level of Hell, frozen forever in one of Satan's three icy, gaping anuses, next to Walt Disney and Karl Rove. But that's only a best guess.
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HeyDude: As I've stated before, I think you're making unreasonable demands on the concept of choice in saying that choice should not be deterministic. Yes, it's a simple semantic difference, but I argue that my semantics is better: My understanding of 'choice' corresponds with the everyday events that we call 'choices' in normal discourse (e.g. which socks to wear today, whether or not to invade Poland), while being able to coexist with a deterministic understanding of the universe that doesn't require some vague, inexplicable concepts like that of 'souls.' Your understanding of 'choice' (it seems to me) derives itself just from the fact that the deterministic process of everyday decisions are so ungraspably complex that they seem to be non-deterministic, which strikes me as forcing a shallow understanding of the term onto a deep understanding, rather than deriving it the other way around. It's the semantic equivalent of proposing epicycles to account for the apparent inconsistencies in the motion of the Planets around the Earth, when the much simpler explanation is that the Planets in fact orbit the Sun.
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...And of course, as I've implied, I don't presume to know anything near everything, so please correct me if I'm wrong.
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My knee-jerk thought is that (and I think we're arriving at the same thought through parallel means, here, DIM) once we start talking about quantum mechanics, there *are* random divergences. If part of your re-winding thought experiment is that these quantum phenomena shake out the same way, your claim is sort of tautological: If we take as an axiom that everything will occur the same way, it will occur the same way. But this isn't really a statement about free will. But DIM did it the smarty-pants way pretty well so I'm going to hit this up with nerd wisdom.
So there are a lot of nerds out there who would mention such an entity as yours with perfect knowledge an an agenda: The Force. The Force is, of course, identifiable with the universe itsel--dammit, DIM. Okay, fine, moving on.
So there was that one episode of Star Trek episode, Cause and Effect where they keep living out the day over and over again. They don't change their behavior until an additional stimulus is added: a sense of deja vu. You see, there's no reason to change their behavior if presented with the same choices, stimuli, etc. That is, they continue to make the same informed choices, and those may be described as free, but there isn't an occasion to make a different choice.
I am not doing a good job with this. Planescape: Torment.
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Yeah, I did kind of gloss over quantum mechanics and I'm not really apologizing for it.
I also glossed over a lot of psychological elements in treating personality as more consistent than it is vis-a-vis immediate environmental factors (e.g. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/06/touching-cognition/). I'm assuming that the question of whether you should be held responsible for wrongs done under extreme immediate stress is not quite what's being discussed here. I'm also assuming that Hitler's crimes were not primarily determined by how hard or soft his chair was.
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Huh. Well.
Everyone keeps talking about determinism, but actually, the assumption of determinism isn't even necessary in order to make these problems meaningful. Consider another interpretation of quantum mechanics: that when particles appear to behave randomly, they really are behaving randomly, such that the universe is probabilistic rather than deterministic. But it's still lawful; Hitler is still entirely a product of (or "Twain-identical to", if you like) his circumstances. So all we need do is assume the universe is lawful, which is an assumption so weak that nobody, I hope, would consider dropping it, since if the universe isn't lawful, all this reasoning and argument is entirely in vain.
Choice exists. The concept of choice doesn't need free will to make sense: all the word "choice" describes is an organism's behavior being caused by some kind of sophisticated mental (and thus neural) process. Free will, by contrast, is nonsense: to believe that free will exists is to believe that behavior is supernatural merely because we don't understand it yet, in the way that a caveman might see a flash of lightning and invent a deity to "explain" it. It follows that the idea of somebody "deserving" punishment or reward is nonsense, too. Criminals don't deserve to go to prison any more than glaciers deserve to melt. All we can do is act according to what we want to accomplish. So I think the right attitude with which to approach criminal justice is not "How can we get back at criminals?" but "How can we reduce the harm that crime does to victims of crime, to criminals, and to society at large?".
Thinking that Hitler was somehow transcendentally evil may be comforting, but the truth is that if we experienced all of his circumstances instead of our own, we would be Twain-identical to him.
Likewise, I would really, really like to avoid truly dying, but barring very sophisticated future technology, our minds are bound to our flesh; if there were any afterlives, dead men would have no way of getting there. Death is for real. In all seriousness, this is extremely tragic; nothing makes me so uncomfortable as the thought of mortality.
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"If I pick nine, you'd better not be racist against me!"
"No promises, niney."
Thinking that Hitler was somehow transcendentally evil may be comforting, but the truth is that if we experienced all of his circumstances instead of our own, we would be Twain-identical to him.
Well, that doesn't tell us much. To be identical to Hitler we'd also have to have Hitler's genetic and physical structure, and really we'd be Hitler and we wouldn't be us. So I think we might be alright in this regard if we point to Hitler and say, "Well, that guy was a really evil set of behaviors." Not that that necessarily makes it transcendental or whatever it is you said.
Now, if it's the case that a person with different biological predispositions and a different upbringing, when placed into the same situations as Hitler at some point along his life after the identity is more formed, would grow to behave as Hitler behaved and believe as Hitler believed, then I think it'd be more meaningful to say "any of us could be Hitler if placed in the same circumstances" -- because we'd need a certain amount of prior experiences in order to be us and not him.
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That was stupid of me: when I wrote "circumstances", I meant to include one's geno- and phenotype, but I didn't say that. Sorry.
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"If I pick nine, you'd better not be racist against me!"
"No promises, niney."
I guess what we're saying is that this conversation was fated and it arose out of predictable personalities and will influence us in predictable ways.
Yeah, but you don't need the Force to know that.
What I do wonder is what BUM makes of all this.
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Wow, this elicited a much greater amount of responses than I expected.
And a lot of it is hard for me to absorb right now.
I'd like to say, that I wouldn't say we are helpless to do whatever, and can't be held accountable. That is to say, if I went around killing people and saying "can't be held accountable, this was all predetermined, people!" then I would be a bad person. Because we can clearly try to be good people. We can think "I don't have to be a bad person like I was raised to be" and fight back. Of course, that fighting back and being a good person would still be predetermined, and would only happen because of the equation we are set within.
However, I feel that concept of good and bad only exists in the constraints of "life as we know it". Hitler should be fully punished in life as we know it, because he was a bad dude.
Once we call into question an afterlife, though, where there is perhaps a God or some system of judgement for our actions in life, this is when I think that no one is accountable for anything that they did.
To clarify, when I might say "everything Hitler experienced" I do mean right down to his genetic code, and every little thing. I'm pulling on chaos theory here, in that when you change a tiny, insignificant decimal you may wind up with a wildly different result. So everything might count, even which air molecules he inhaled at a given moment. Probably not really. But we might as well be safe about it.
To Wil, it is a bit tautological to say that if nothing is random then it will always play out the same way, but mostly that was just to emphasize a point. I'm just not convinced that quantum mechanics really has anything random about it. I don't feel it's justified to say that the pinnacle of human learning and understanding is without an ability to waver. If something seems random and maybe it is so convincingly random that no human could ever fathom anything other than that, at any point in human understanding, I can't believe it really is random instead of having some super-subtle mechanics upon which it is predictably based.
Also, once upon a time I considered that perhaps the mind and body were connected, and the soul was individual, and the actions of the mind were no more telling of the soul than would be the actions of the body. That might fix some problems with afterlife punishment, but perhaps create more elsewhere.
In the end, this is quite interesting, and again I didn't get a chance to absorb all of it right now.
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Well, really the crux of your dilemma comes from whether or not we have randomness in the world. Kodi mentioned this in his first paragraph, but then didn't really follow up on it in the subsequent ones. The question then becomes, can there be an entity, like God, that knows what actions a particle will take? In terms of Heisenberg, can this god know both the position and the velocity of the particle?
If we think that God is all-knowing, then I can see how one might think that God would have to know both, but I disagree. If we follow that logic, as you have, then we may approach the ideas as you have, barring Shai's information-based view of the Universe and God's knowledge being Twain-identical to the Universe itself. I would rather assume that an all-knowing God knows all about the past, but not the future. In the Judeo-Christian imagining of God, this certainly makes sense.
What that does allow, though, is for this God to know all the probabilities of everything that could happen, based on what we know has happened already. He can predict which Carbon atom will decay, and he would certainly be more able to choose correctly than any other non-perfect being in the Universe, but it's still just probability. What makes something random is not merely that it is unknowable, but that, given the absolutely same parameters, the outcome can be different. It's why we only have true randomness on the quantum level, and as we scale up from there we get slightly less random.
Given that, we can replay a day over and over again and get different results each time, because of the random factors. These different results may not be statistically significant, depending on the scale you look at, but they would still be different, and they would add up. I think of it in terms of Markov models (naturally, considering my research). Knowing the probabilities, I know the most likely path. It's likely that my day wouldn't change significantly if I did this day again with no extra knowledge. But what if the random particle went and made my battery on 360 control drain faster. It could have had a small effect on my day. Or what if the particles on the soccer ball and Donovon's foot interacted a little bit differently, sending one of those really close shots into the goal? There's a factor that is thousands of miles and billions of particles away from me, and yet it can still have an effect.
I forgot where I was going with this. Basically I was rejecting your premise of a perfect being knowing all and being able to perfectly predict the future. Einstein may have said that God does not play dice with the universe, but that's just because God doesn't play games unless he knows he can win.
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"To truly live, one must first be born." ~ Evan [aX]
Paper Mario Social: The Safe Haven of GameFAQs. (Board 2000083)
God doesn't play games unless he knows he can win.
[citation needed]
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Fine, that was just a pithy remark, you can strike it from the record.
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"To truly live, one must first be born." ~ Evan [aX]
Paper Mario Social: The Safe Haven of GameFAQs. (Board 2000083)
Lovely. 'Cause it says here in this book that God wrestled a dude to a draw once...
Anyway. BUM:
Once we call into question an afterlife, though, where there is perhaps a God or some system of judgement for our actions in life, this is when I think that no one is accountable for anything that they did.
Are you saying that you don't accept the possibility for a true Heaven-for-good-people/Hell-for-bad-people dichotomy?
James:
I'm not certain at all, but maybe -- and this may very well be unknowable -- just because something is observed to behave probabilistically, that doesn't necessarily entail that it might behave a different way if we reset the day and let it run again (if that's even a meaningful idea). Or I may just not know enough about quantum mechanics to know how it's supposed to work.
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Yes, it means that I don't think there can be a classical "heaven for the good, hell for the bad" system. Kind of. I suppose there could be, if there were a sort of "souls are here but we can't tap into them and they are learning from the actions of the mind-body, but are not directly responsible for the mind-body, and the mind-body has no impact on the soul's goodness or evilness, it's just a learning experience for the soul"
Is that too much?
But yeah. Now, I'm not saying we're "trapped" by the circumstances that surround us. For example, if a fortune-teller told me I would go to Hell, I could strive to go to Heaven, and then accomplish just this! Yet, nonetheless, I would have fulfilled my true destiny, because it would have been predestined that a psychic would tell me my future was hell, even if her powers were real, and then I would avert that course and go to heaven.
However, someone who has a great likelihood to not care about good and bad, though they should be punished in this life, would not be accountable to God. I mean, can one deny that if you were to raise 100 children in a good environment where they were taught to be good, and 100 in the opposite, that we might expect results like this: 95 "good" children went to heaven. 95 "bad" children went to hell. 5 of each took the opposite paths of their cohort.
These results, if they were to be (and I have to imagine them likely, even if I have no proof of them with me) are statistically significant! There's clearly a difference in those children that has influenced their outcomes! How, then, can a perfect and loving God punish them, when they were put into bad situations? Sure, they made the choices they did... but it's still statistically significant, and we have to assume their ability to care about doing the good thing was severely impaired by their circumstances.
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"And that slave who knew his master's will and did not get ready or act in accord with his will, will receive many lashes, but the one who did not know it, and committed deeds worthy of a flogging, will receive but few. From everyone who has been given much, much will be required; and to whom they entrusted much, of him they will ask all the more."
Well, BUM, you're clearly making another huge assumption, and that's that God's justice is dependent on likelihood, expectation, and culpability. Ccouldn't it equally be the case that God just doesn't care about your upbringing and will let you live in heaven if you do good and make you burn forever if you do bad? Or throw you into the Pit if you're an unbeliever and give you a cheese sandwich if you're a Mormon? Or make you Captain of the Squad if you die happy and bring you back as a crab if you die sad?
I think my point is, I'm not sure what your concept of justice entails, nor that it necessary applies to the afterlife.
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Neat excerpt, Alex. A thoughtful inclusion I'd say. I like how you somehow always have these pieces of information from such a vast source.
Also, yes, it's definitely one theory. I mean, first off, I don't believe in God, though I haven't ruled it out. So we're already playing games if I'm even talking about Him. I wouldn't claim that He can't be an evil god, or a god who throws darts and punishes based on that, or that He even has a Heaven and Hell system. I have no idea.
But, what I'm going with, in this particular argument, is the popular notion that there is a God, and he is all loving, and he has a system for Heaven and Hell, and our actions on Earth dictate where we will wind up. It's obviously a large assumption, but I'm playing this game because you'll find many more people who will say that is what they imagine the afterlife to be like, rather than, say, God is a giant whale and our souls become plankton. So I want to play with as many people as I can, that actually believe in God, and that's why the assumption is made, for this particular argument.
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As an aside, I'll agree that, from a truly skeptical point of view, it could equally be as probable that there's a cheese sandwich scenario as much as any other scenario, including the "classic" or at least modern classic scenario most modern Christians believe in. I mean, from the true skeptics position, it's equally likely that cause and effect does or does not exist. What we think the afterlife might be with is pretty arbitrary, including my idea of what is just and moral.
I'm just picking this scenario based on popularity.
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